I recently switched an application I am working on from nginx and mongrel to nginx and passenger. The setup is easy as can be but I noticed an issue on one of my long running operations. I have a controller that spawns some threads, performs operations and returns back a result to the page. Sometimes this takes a minute and using mongrel you would just increase the proxy_read_timeout in nginx. With passenger it times out after 60 seconds. There is not a configuration parameter for adjusting this. I found that adjusting upstream.read_timeout and upstream.send_timeout in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.1/ext/nginx/Configuration.c (below) to a higher value and reinstalling the passenger module solves the problem.
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.1/ext/nginx/Configuration.c
::snip::
ngx_conf_merge_msec_value(conf->upstream.send_timeout,
prev->upstream.send_timeout, 60000);ngx_conf_merge_msec_value(conf->upstream.read_timeout,
prev->upstream.read_timeout, 60000);
::snip::
Thanks to the passenger team and the quick response on the mailing list.
