Nginx + fair load balancer patch looping

[Alexander Staubo]

An Nginx instance suddenly started spewing the following to its error
log at a rate of about 1GB/minute, and using a bit more CPU than
usual:

  2008/02/29 10:33:47 [error] 16875#0: *126309461 upstream prematurely
closed connection while reading response header from upstream [...]

Aside from the excessive logging, everything else seemed normal. Our
next_upstream setting is:

  proxy_next_upstream error invalid_header;

Restarting Nginx fixed the problem.

Could this be the fair load balancer going hairwire?

Alexander.