# Why would nginx 0.7.6 drop requests randomly

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-would-nginx-0-7-6-drop-requests-randomly/227155>\
**Category:** NGINX\
**Created:** [March 6, 2013, 1:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-would-nginx-0-7-6-drop-requests-randomly/227155 "2013-03-06T01:23:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![romez777](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a5b964/32.png) [@romez777](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/romez777)\
**Post date:** [March 6, 2013, 1:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-would-nginx-0-7-6-drop-requests-randomly/227155/1 "2013-03-06T01:23:28Z")

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I notice our server is rapidly responding 500 errors for random pages.  
Our setup is pretty basic. We are running Nginx 0.7.6 with Unicorn and a  
Rails app on a Ubuntu 10.4 server.

What ever the problem, it doesn’t seem to happen at the application  
level since Unicorn logs don’t contain any errors. Next we looked at  
Nginx’s error logs and there is nothing suspicious but even though the  
site seemingly works when we monitor the Nginx’s access log there are a  
lot of 500 error responses  
for random pages of our site.

This is really strange since our server isn’t under a lot of load. It  
uses a 4 core Linode instance and we have 4 Nginx worker processes.

Could someone people point us to the right direction?

Thanks

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![romez777](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a5b964/32.png) [@romez777](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/romez777)\
**Post date:** [March 6, 2013, 12:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/why-would-nginx-0-7-6-drop-requests-randomly/227155/2 "2013-03-06T12:55:09Z")

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Hello!

On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 01:23:28AM +0100, Arman M. wrote:

> This is really strange since our server isn’t under a lot of load. It  
> uses a 4 core Linode instance and we have 4 Nginx worker processes.
> 
> Could someone people point us to the right direction?

If it indeed happens in nginx, I would suppose it’s some  
configuration problem, something like rewrite loop, or proxy loop,  
or something similar. It should have reasons logged to error log  
though. To make sure it’s indeed happens in nginx, and not  
returned by your application, you may try logging $upstream\_status  
variable, see docs here:

> **[Module ngx\_http\_upstream\_module](http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html)**

You may also use debug log to check what goes wrong in details,  
see here:

> **[A debugging log](http://nginx.org/en/docs/debugging_log.html)**

But in any case 0.7.6 is a 5 years old development version, and  
you may want to upgrade.

–  
Maxim D.

> **[nginx: donation](http://nginx.org/en/donation.html)**