Nginx – Fixing 104: Connection Reset by Peer Error

I have a server which was working ok until 3rd Oct 2013 at 10:50am when it began to intermittently return "502 Bad Gateway" errors to the client.

Approximately 4 out of 5 browser requests succeed but about 1 in 5 fail with a 502.

The nginx error log contains many hundreds of these errors;

2013/10/05 06:28:17 [error] 3111#0: *54528 recv() failed (104: Connection reset by peer) while reading response header from upstream, client: 66.249.66.75, server: www.bec-components.co.uk  request: ""GET /?_n=Fridgefreezer/Hotpoint/8591P;_i=x8078 HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "www.bec-components.co.uk"

However the PHP error log does not contain any matching errors.

Is there a way to get PHP to give me more info about why it is resetting the connection?

This is nginx.conf;

user              www-data;
worker_processes  4;
error_log         /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid               /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
   worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
  include          /etc/nginx/mime.types;
  access_log       /var/log/nginx/access.log;

  sendfile               on;
  keepalive_timeout      30;
  tcp_nodelay            on;
  client_max_body_size   100m;

  gzip         on;
  gzip_types   text/plain application/xml text/javascript application/x-javascript text/css;
  gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";

  include /gvol/sites/*/nginx.conf;

}

And this is the .conf for this site;

server {

  server_name   www.bec-components.co.uk bec3.uk.to bec4.uk.to bec.home;
  root          /gvol/sites/bec/www/;
  index         index.php index.html;

  location ~ \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
    expires        2592000;   # 30 days
    log_not_found  off;
  }

  ## Trigger client to download instead of display '.xml' files.
  location ~ \.xml$ {
    add_header Content-disposition "attachment; filename=$1";
  }

   location ~ \.php$ {
      fastcgi_read_timeout  3600;
      include               /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
      keepalive_timeout     0;
      fastcgi_param         SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
      fastcgi_pass          127.0.0.1:9000;
      fastcgi_index         index.php;
   }
}

## bec-components.co.uk ##
server {
   server_name   bec-components.co.uk;
   rewrite       ^/(.*) http://www.bec-components.co.uk$1 permanent;
}