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My next stop was lighttpd. A fine piece of software, with a persistent bug that caused it to drop into a 500 state if FastCGI instances were ever unavailable.

It is not a bug, it is a feature. lighttpd used to wait 60s before checking the backend again. Nowadays the default is 1s. Set disable-time to 0 if you don't like it (it should be the default IMHO.)

http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/Docs_ModF...




The problem was not that lighty gave a 500 error for transient unavailability.

It's that it got stuck in 500. I would have to log in every week or so and restart it when this happened.


In case you're wondering whatever happened to this bug, it's still happening! I installed the latest release of Lighttpd a few weeks ago and it happened on one of our sites. So amazing to see the same bug still kicking after 3-4 years..


I have this bug/feature as well, switched to nginx as a result.




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