Hi,

I've experiencing something similar. After some time (some hours, but I'm getting not that much hits), PHP appears to be not responding anymore: Processes are running, but nginx times out: First with upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream then recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream

This happened with php-cgi and a custom start script a few days ago (same symptoms, have not checked logs carefully), and today after I've switched to using php-fpm.

So, both php-cgi and php-fpm appear to not behave well with nginx. Those problems never appeared using lighttpd (in the same container/machine), but are happening now since I have only PHP running in the container/machine and nginx (acting as first proxy in line) is directly forwarding to it.

Maybe this did not happen with lighttpd before, because it (and the php-cgi process) was regularly restarted, which is not the case currently.

I've found http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39809

I'm running PHP 5.3.1-0.dotdeb.1 and nginx 0.8.33-0~ppa2.

I guess this is rather a PHP than an nginx problem, since restarting php-fpm fixes it.

For now, I've tried bumping the number of child processes, hoping that this will prevent the PHP processes entering the ignoring state.

Here's a munin graph from the PHP container (http://i.imgur.com/MHbNi.png) - the failing started with the increasing number of established network connection: those are probably the connections from nginx queuing up, without being answered.

So in your case there aren't any php-cgi processes anymore? Have you checked the php error log?

Cheers, Daniel