Question

Experiencing a lot of downtime

I’m using uptimerobot.com to measure the uptime of my server. Unfortunately it goes down a lot! Almost twice a day for maybe just one to two minutes. I can’t find anything in my logs and am completely lost what is going wrong. I’ve looked at all log files and can’t find anything out of the ordinary (apart from the 301 responses from uptimerobot.com). I have no clue what to look for now.

I’m using Varnish on port 80, Nginx on port 443 and Apache on port 8080. Both ports 80 and 443 are open. When I go to my site (quentinbuiteman.com) on all possible URL’s, I just get there, so the configuration seems to be working correctly.


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Jonathan Tittle
DigitalOcean Employee
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July 14, 2017
Accepted Answer

@QuentinBuiteman

My initial thought would be that NGINX isn’t passing on the headers that you’re targeting when it proxies a request. In addition to proxy_pass, I normally run the following configuration:

        proxy_buffers 16 32k;
        proxy_buffer_size 64k;
        proxy_busy_buffers_size 128k;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_pragma $http_authorization;
        proxy_connect_timeout 59s;
        proxy_hide_header X-Powered-By;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control Expires;
        proxy_next_upstream error timeout invalid_header http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504 http_404;
        proxy_no_cache $http_pragma $http_authorization;
        proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;
        proxy_read_timeout 600;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_send_timeout 600;
        proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
        proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding '';
        proxy_set_header Cookie $http_cookie;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header Proxy '';
        proxy_set_header Referer $http_referer;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Original-Request $request_uri;

The above is pulled from my own configuration that I’ve used for some time in various setups (which includes WordPress behind a proxy).

I’d recommend testing that out and seeing if that helps. You’d want to restart NGINX once the changes are in place. From there, I’d be happy to check on my end to see if that resolves the issue I’m seeing on my end.

If it doesn’t work, I’d check the logs to see if there’s anything more than we can pinpoint.

tail -20 /var/log/nginx/error.log
Jonathan Tittle
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
July 15, 2017

@QuentinBuiteman

From what I can see on my end, things are looking good :-) – looks like it’s loading in less than a second on my end.

Jonathan Tittle
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
July 14, 2017

@QuentinBuiteman

When I visit your website, I’m seeing an error:

Too many redirects

… which would be a configuration issue that would, in most cases, be detected as downtime since it prevents your site from being displayed as expected.

1). Are you using Varnish + Apache, or Varnish + NGINX + Apache?

2). What kind of site is this (i.e. WordPress, static, NodeJS, etc)?

3). Are you using anything else in front (i.e. CloudFlare)?

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