Active connections are growing in regexp-ed location with alias

[bodomic]

Hi there,

We've found an undefined behavior in certain condition, tend to consider
this as a bug.
'If alias is used inside a location defined with a regular expression
then such regular expression should contain captures and alias should
refer to these captures (0.7.40)'. If, contrary, we're mistakenly using
a regexp with selection but alias does not contain $1 variable, we're
getting Not Found errors for some random substrings of alias value. More
on that, active connections are growing in this situation until
workers*clients number is reached, and then nginx stops accepting
connections, causing Connection Timed Out on client.

location ~* ^/data_15/hot/(article|news)/([0-9]+)\.htm$ { 
          alias /opt/project.ru/default/empty.html; 
 }

In error log we can see mostly "open() "/opt/project.ru/defau" failed
(2: No such file or directory)", though sometimes path is
'/opt/project.ru/default/empty.html^P' or
'/opt/project.ru/default/empty.html^A' or even
'/opt/project.ru/default/empty.html7m<99>;96>I?<9E>^WIj?1X?7m<8A>^A"'.

OS is Debian 6.0.4
uname -a
Linux frontend-7 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Jan 16 16:22:28 UTC 2012
x86_64 GNU/Linux

nginx -V
nginx version: nginx/1.0.12
built by gcc 4.4.5 (Debian 4.4.5-8) 
TLS SNI support enabled
configure arguments: --prefix=/ --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx_new
--conf-path=/etc/nginx_new/nginx_new.conf
--pid-path=/var/run/nginx_new.pid --lock-path=/var/lock/nginx_new.lock
--error-log-path=/var/log/nginx_new/error.log
--http-log-path=/var/log/nginx_new/access.log --user=www-data
--group=www-data --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_realip_module
--with-http_gzip_static_module --with-http_image_filter_module
--with-pcre=../../libs/pcre-8.21 --with-zlib=../../libs/zlib-1.2.5
--with-openssl=../../libs/openssl-1.0.0e
--http-client-body-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx_new/body
--http-proxy-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx_new/proxy
--http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx_new/fastcgi
--http-uwsgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx_new/uwsgi-temp
--http-scgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx_new/scgi-temp
--with-http_dav_module --with-http_stub_status_module
--with-http_geoip_module
--add-module=../../libs/nginx_mogilefs_module-1.0.4
--with-http_secure_link_module

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?21,226895,226895#msg-226895