I am getting these kind of errors:
2014/05/24 11:49:06 [error] 8376#0: *54031 upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream
We ended up realising that our one server that was experiencing this had busted fpm config resulting in php errors/warnings/notices that'd normally be logged to disk were being sent over the FCGI socket. It looks like there's a parsing bug when part of the header gets split across the buffer chunks.
So setting php_admin_value[error_log] to something actually writeable and restarting php-fpm was enough to fix the problem.
We could reproduce the problem with a smaller script:
Raising the buffers made the 502s harder to hit but not impossible, e.g native:
bash-4.1# for it in {30..200..3}; do for size in {100..250..3}; do echo "size=$size iterations=$it $(curl -sv "http://localhost/debug.php?size=$size&iterations=$it" 2>&1 | egrep '^< HTTP')"; done; done | grep 502 | head
size=121 iterations=30 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=109 iterations=33 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=232 iterations=33 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=241 iterations=48 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=145 iterations=51 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=226 iterations=51 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=190 iterations=60 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=115 iterations=63 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=109 iterations=66 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=163 iterations=69 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
[... there would be more here, but I piped through head ...]
fastcgi_buffers 16 16k; fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;:
bash-4.1# for it in {30..200..3}; do for size in {100..250..3}; do echo "size=$size iterations=$it $(curl -sv "http://localhost/debug.php?size=$size&iterations=$it" 2>&1 | egrep '^< HTTP')"; done; done | grep 502 | head
size=223 iterations=69 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=184 iterations=165 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
size=151 iterations=198 < HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
So I believe the correct answer is: fix your fpm config so it logs errors to disk.