Nginx – Preventing PHP-FPM from crashing under light load

I'm getting a DoS attack on a wordpress site that I host.

173.192.109.118 - - [30/Sep/2015:22:31:36 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 499 0 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"

I get about ~140 of these logs in my nginx access log (took about 10 seconds, so ~14 req/second), and then they switch to 502:

173.192.109.118 - - [30/Sep/2015:22:31:46 +0000] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 502 537 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"

At that point, PHP-FPM has to be restarted to restore the site.

So, my question is: Is there anything that I can do to prevent one lone attacker from crashing PHP-FPM?

Most of my (limited) experience has been with Apache, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I tried to set sane limits on everything. The server has plenty of RAM under load, so that doesn't seem to be the issue. I just added a rate-limiter from the following tutorial: https://www.howtoforge.com/rate-limiting-with-nginx, and while that appears to delay the agony, it still ends up crashing PHP-FPM.

The /var/log/php5-fpm.log doesn't seem to show anything interesting or useful other than a couple of errors that I introduced when I forgot to add a leading / in the config file, and a bunch of success lines from restarting:

[30-Sep-2015 23:03:51] ERROR: Unable to create or open slowlog(/usr/log/www.log.slow): No such file or directory (2)
[30-Sep-2015 23:03:51] ERROR: failed to post process the configuration
[30-Sep-2015 23:03:51] ERROR: FPM initialization failed
[30-Sep-2015 23:05:47] NOTICE: configuration file /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf test is successful

/etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

[www]
user = www-data
group = www-data
listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.sock
listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 5
pm.start_servers = 2
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 3
pm.status_path = /status
ping.path = /ping
ping.response = pong
slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm_$pool.slow.log
request_slowlog_timeout = 30
request_terminate_timeout = 30
chdir = /

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
events {
    worker_connections 768;
}
http {
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";
    gzip_vary on;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_comp_level 6;
    gzip_buffers 16 8k;
    gzip_http_version 1.1;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    limit_req_zone  $binary_remote_addr  zone=one:10m   rate=1r/s;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com

server {
  server_name localhost www.example.com;
  return 301 http://example.com$request_uri;
}
server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
    root /var/www/html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;
    server_name example.com;

    client_max_body_size 500M;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
    }

    error_page 404 /404.html;

    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /var/www/html;
    }

    location ~*  \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js|woff)$ {
            expires 365d;
    }
        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
            fastcgi_index index.php;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include fastcgi_params;
            limit_req zone=one burst=5;
        }

    location /status {
        fastcgi_pass php;
    }

    location /ping {
        fastcgi_pass php;
    }

    location ~ /\. {
        deny all;
    }
}

** UPDATE **

I've updated the title to reflect my question a little better, in hopes that I will attract some quality discussion on PHP-FPM tuning.

As a secondary question, and possibly more important than my first question, I am wondering: How do I tune/harden PHP-FPM to utilize all my available server resources without crashing first.

Apache / PHP may not have been as efficient, but it didn't stop serving requests until the server was brought down to its knees, and then when the attack was over, the site was back up. It seems rather unpleasant to have to manually restart a service that got slightly overworked. (14 req/second is really nothing)

I agree with the ideas to utilize fail2ban to mitigate DoS attacks, but what I'm really worried about is what will happen if/when regular traffic gets to 15 req/second?