Failover for down host slow - taking full proxy_connect_timeout

[Peter Weck]

I've set up nginx as a load balancer (proxy).  When one of the
upstream hosts goes down such that connections to the host fail
immediately, it is taking nginx the full proxy_connect_timeout to fail
each request that is sent to that proxy.  Is there a way to configure
nginx such that when a connection to an upstream server fails, it gets
treated as a failure without waiting for the full
proxy_connect_timeout before treating it as a failed connection?

Here's my config file:

user nginx;
worker_processes  2;
worker_rlimit_nofile 10000;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  4000;
    use epoll;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    gzip  on;

  upstream backend {
        ip_hash;
        server 10.0.0.30:81   max_fails=2  fail_timeout=120s;
        server 10.0.0.40:81   max_fails=2  fail_timeout=120s;
  }

  server {
    listen 80 default;
    proxy_buffers 64 4k;

    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real_IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-SSL-Request "";

    location / {
      proxy_connect_timeout  2;
      proxy_read_timeout    10;

      proxy_pass http://backend;
    }
  }

}