Broken pipe while sending request to upstream

[Claudio]

Hi.

I've set up nginx as a proxy for a jetty service. Works nicely, most of the
time, except

... when issuing a (somewhat) larger POST request to some entity which is
protected by HTTP Basic access authentication.

The web app responds with a 401 immediately, probably closing the connection
right away:

127.0.0.1 -  -  [17/Sep/2013:14:17:38 +0000] "POST /scm/blub?cmd=unbundle
HTTP/1.0" 401 1412

But nginx gratuitously insists on sending all the data, which fails
eventually:

2013/09/17 16:17:38 [error] 22873#0: *1 writev() failed (32: Broken pipe)
while sending request to upstream, client: 192.168.2.8, server: test.int,
request: "POST /scm/blub?cmd=unbundle HTTP/1.1", upstream:
"http://127.0.0.1:8082/scm/blub?cmd=unbundle", host: "test.int"

I also tried different config options like enabling sendfile, increasing
buffer and timeout sizes, but it didn't help.

Is there some way to make this work? Is this a bug?

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on linux with nginx 1.1.19-1ubuntu0.2.

Thanks for any help!

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,242919,242919#msg-242919