nginx: worker process is shutting down

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 04:27:05PM +0300, Christos Chatzaras wrote:

> Every time I do "nginx -s reload" I see a process:
> 
> nginx: worker process is shutting down
> 
> This process never stops even after a long time.
> 
> Any idea what cause this issue?

When shutting down, nginx waits for all active requests to be 
finished (internally - by closing any idle connections while and 
checking if there are any pending timers left).  This may take a 
long time, especially when using long polling or similar things.

If you see that shutting down never finishes though, and there are 
no live connections as your lsof output suggests - this may 
indicate a bug.

Note though that this can be easily caused by a 3rd party module, 
so as a first step I would recommend checking "nginx -V" output 
and recompiling without any 3rd party modules if there are any 
(3rd party modules are explicitly marked in the port options).

[...]

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/