Configuration tuning for best performance with upstream nodes down

[denis]

Maxim Dounin wrote:
>> http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxHttpUpstreamModule#server
>> Is a bit confusing to me; fail_timeout and max_fails seem to be the
>> numbers to work with, but as it appears, tuning fail_timeout down would
>> also mean that downed backends would be tried again faster?!
> Yes.  And to make things even more clear: fail_timeout has nothing to do
> with upstream response time, it's just a time frame for nginx to
> remember fails.
> It looks like you really want to tune how fails are detected.  Take a
> look at ngx_http_proxy_module configuration, notably
> proxy_connect_timeout and proxy_read_timeout.
> Note: proxy_connect_timeout defaults to 60s - its way too high for
> backends under you control.  I recommend tuning this to something like 2s.
> Note: proxy_read_timeout defaults to 60s too, and depending on you task
> this may be either too high or too small.

Thanks! This cleared up things a lot, I took the liberty of updating the
wikipage http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxHttpUpstreamModule#server to
clarify and link these parameters.

Regards
--
Denis