Fastcgi_next_upstream settings and "Connection reset by peer" errors

I have a nginx setup with a fastcgi upstream of 5 servers
10.1.1.1 to 10.1.1.5

When a PHP has a long loop (which is due to bad php coding which is
difficult to fix at this moment where the PHP process itself crashes),

The nginx fastcgi request loops through all the servers, for example the
error logs show:
2012/10/14 18:33:52 [error] 4478#0: *900244 recv() failed (104:
Connection
reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client:
122.32.55.139, server: mydomain.com, request: “GET /132727767 HTTP/1.1”,
upstream: “fastcgi://10.1.1.1:9000”, host: “www.mydomain.com
2012/10/14 18:34:06 [error] 4478#0: *900244 recv() failed (104:
Connection
reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client:
122.32.55.139, server: mydomain.com, request: “GET /132727767 HTTP/1.1”,
upstream: “fastcgi://10.1.1.2:9000”, host: “www.mydomain.com
2012/10/14 18:34:23 [error] 4478#0: *900244 recv() failed (104:
Connection
reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client:
122.32.55.139, server: mydomain.com, request: “GET /132727767 HTTP/1.1”,
upstream: “fastcgi://10.1.1.3:9000”, host: “www.mydomain.com
2012/10/14 18:34:36 [error] 4478#0: *900244 recv() failed (104:
Connection
reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client:
122.32.55.139, server: mydomain.com, request: “GET /132727767 HTTP/1.1”,
upstream: “fastcgi://10.1.1.4:9000”, host: “www.mydomain.com
2012/10/14 18:34:52 [error] 4478#0: *900244 recv() failed (104:
Connection
reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client:
122.32.55.139, server: mydomain.com, request: “GET /132727767 HTTP/1.1”,
upstream: “fastcgi://10.1.1.5:9000”, host: “www.mydomain.com

Therefore I have tried
fastcgi_next_upstream error;
and
fastcgi_next_upstream off;

But this does not seem to help… Am I missing something?