503 due to content-length error? microwave issue?

[Michael Loftis]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Alan Dixon <alan.g.dixon at gmail.com> wrote:
> whereas I get the answer back to varnish who then sends it on to me
> properly. In both cases, varnish is correctly pass'ing the request to
> the apache backend, and the headers look almost identical (we're both
> running chrome - she's on windows and I'm on linux). Her content
> length is almost the same, with the same content-type/boundary.
>
> Any clues?


Where I've personally seen this is with lighttpd+php-fcgi where the
FastCGI binary was actually crashing (in my case we're hitting a core
dump bug in PHP) after setting content headers, and varnish received
less, or more, content than indicated by Content-Length.  Varnish
doesn't handle misbehaving backends very well in my experience.  If
(for whatever reason) your PHP app is crashing, or sending incorrect
content-length headers varnish may interpret it this way.  May or may
be the ISP mangling HTTP traffic.