Absent FastCGI process blocking static files?

[jlist9]

Hi, I have a server that's configured to talk to a Python fastcgi process,
a PHP fastcgi process, and also load some static files from the html directory.

I find that when the backend servers are up, nginx loads the static files fine.
However, if the Python process is not running, nginx fails to load static files
(browser times out.) However, if the PHP process is not running but the Python
process is running, nginx loads static files fine. I'm assuming this has to
do with the location expression, I'm using "/" for Python back-end and
"~ \.php$" for PHP back-end. But the question is, is this the expected
behavior? If a back-end process is down, should it affect all static files
as well?