We hit the front page of digg the other night, and our servers didn't handle it well at all. Here's a little of what happened, and perhaps someone has some suggestions on what to tweak!

Basic setup, nginx 0.5.35, serving up static image content, and then passing php requests to 2 backend servers running apache, all running red hat el4.

Now, we started seeing the following: upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while connecting to upstream

So, perhaps the 2 backend servers couldn't handle the load? We were serving the page mostly out of memcache at this point. In any case, couldn't figure out why that wasn't sufficient, so we replaced the page with a static html one.

This seemed to help, but we were now seeing a lot of these: connect() failed (113: No route to host) while connecting to upstream no live upstreams while connecting to upstream

This wasn't on every request, but a significant percentage. This, we couldn't figure out. Why couldn't it connect to the backend servers? We ended up rebooting both of the backend servers, and these errors stopped.