NGINX: upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream

Question

This happens because your upstream takes too long to answer the request and NGINX thinks the upstream already failed in processing the request, so it responds with an error. Just include and increase proxy_read_timeout in location config block. Same thing happened to me and I used 1 hour timeout for an internal app at work:

proxy_read_timeout 3600;

With this, NGINX will wait for an hour (3600s) for its upstream to return something.

You should always refrain from increasing the timeouts, I doubt your backend server response time is the issue here in any case.

I got around this issue by clearing the connection keep-alive flag and specifying http version as per the answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/36589120/479632

server {
    location / {
        proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   Host      $http_host;

        # these two lines here
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Connection "";

        proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
    }
}

Unfortunately I can't explain why this works and didn't manage to decipher it from the docs mentioned in the answer linked either so if anyone has an explanation I'd be very interested to hear it.

First figure out which upstream is slowing by consulting the nginx error log file and adjust the read time out accordingly in my case it was fastCGI

2017/09/27 13:34:03 [error] 16559#16559: *14381 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php/php5.6-fpm.sock", host: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", referrer: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

So i have to adjust the fastcgi_read_timeout in my server configuration

 location ~ \.php$ {
     fastcgi_read_timeout 240;
     ...
 }

See: original post

In your case it helps a little optimization in proxy, or you can use "# time out settings"

location / 
{        

  # time out settings
  proxy_connect_timeout 159s;
  proxy_send_timeout   600;
  proxy_read_timeout   600;
  proxy_buffer_size    64k;
  proxy_buffers     16 32k;
  proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
  proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
  proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;
  proxy_redirect     off;
  proxy_hide_header  Vary;
  proxy_set_header   Accept-Encoding '';
  proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control Expires;
  proxy_set_header   Referer $http_referer;
  proxy_set_header   Host   $host;
  proxy_set_header   Cookie $http_cookie;
  proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}

I would recommend to look at the error_logs, specifically at the upstream part where it shows specific upstream that is timing out.

Then based on that you can adjust proxy_read_timeout, fastcgi_read_timeout or uwsgi_read_timeout.

Also make sure your config is loaded.

More details here Nginx upstream timed out (why and how to fix)

I think this error can happen for various reasons, but it can be specific to the module you're using. For example I saw this using the uwsgi module, so had to set "uwsgi_read_timeout".