I\'ve just installed a nginx+php-fpm server. Everything seems fine except that PHP-FPM never writes error to its log.
fpm.conf
[default]
listen = /va
In my case php-fpm outputs 500 error without any logging because of missing php-mysql module. I moved joomla installation to another server and forgot about it. So apt-get install php-mysql and service restart solved it.
I started with trying to fix broken logging without success. Finally with strace i found fail message after db-related system calls. Though my case is not directly related to op's question, I hope it could be useful.