Sporatic 502 errors with Ruby on Rails site running on Nginx

Question

My Ruby on Rails site is throwing sporadic 502 errors. It is running on Nginx, installed with Passenger, and is hosted on a server running Ubuntu 10.04. It seems that the errors are becoming more and more sparse, but they're still causing a problem.

I am guessing that it has something to do with buffer size, but am not sure.

I know there are a few other questions on here from people with the same problem, but it seems to be very peculiar.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions. I can give you any specs or version numbers that you may need.

#user  nobody;
worker_processes  1;

#error_log  logs/error.log;
#error_log  logs/error.log  notice;
#error_log  logs/error.log  info;

#pid        logs/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    passenger_root /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p362/gems/passenger-3.0.18;
    passenger_ruby /usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.3-p362/ruby;

    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;

gzip  on;

#buffer size
proxy_buffers 8 16k;
proxy_buffer_size 32k;
passenger_buffers 8 16k;
passenger_buffer_size 32k;
passenger_max_pool_size 200;    

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name thelist.io;
    rails_env production;
    root /var/www/thelist.io/public;
    passenger_enabled on;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name grant.XXXX.com;
    root /home/jackson/XXXX.XXXXX.com/;
            location / {
        index  index.php;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;

    #charset koi8-r;

    #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

    location / {
        root   html;
        index  index.html index.htm;
    }

    #error_page  404              /404.html;

    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    #
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   html;
    }

    # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
    #
    location ~ \.php$ {
        root           html;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index  index.php;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
        include        fastcgi_params;
    }

    # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
    # concurs with nginx's one

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny  all;
    }
}

}

Could you give some context? There's toooons of reasons for RoR 502s. Could be buffers, could be session headers too big, could be file permissions, bad routes, or db permissions. — Stephan, Feb 06 '13 at 02:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 06 '13 at 22:24

The HTTP Error 502 means your application is not answering nginx on time, so you will probably need to scale it up.

When you use Rails, or other FastCGI server, such as PHP-FPM, nginx is the frontend.

So, nginx serves as a proxy, repassing the data to the FastCGI Server (Rails in your case).

Be sure that rails is using all it can from the serving machine, and if it don't fit with your request volume, you'll need to scale up (create more instances of the application server and distribute the webapp's tasks)

Sporatic 502 errors with Ruby on Rails site running on Nginx

1 Answers1