Upstream block: backup with max_fails=0 does not appear to work as expected

[Roman Arutyunyan]

Hi Jonathan,

On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 05:05:51PM -0400, Jonathan Simowitz via nginx wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have an upstream block with two servers as follows:
> 
> upstream {
>   server foo.com;
>   server bar.com max_fails=0 backup;
> }
> 
> My desired use case would be that the foo.com server is hit for all
> requests and can be marked as down by nginx if it starts serving errors. In
> this case nginx will fallback to hitting bar.com, however bar.com should
> not be allowed to be marked down by nginx.
> 
> What is actually happening is the "max_fails=0" statement is essentially
> being ignored causing the error message "no live upstreams while connecting
> to upstream" in my logs.

That's what happens when bar.com is in fact unavailable too.
Even though it's not globally marked as down.

[..]

-- 
Roman Arutyunyan