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.)
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..
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...