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# Nginx, Tomcat, upstream sent too big header while reading response
- URL: https://helpmonks.com/blog/nginx-error-with-tomcat-upstream-sent-too-big-header-while-reading-response-header-from-upstream/
- Published: 2010-02-02T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-06T20:07:47.000Z
- Description: Nginx is our favorite web server currently as it is fast, lean and easy to configure. Performance is just outstanding and if you haven't take a look at it. O
- Author: Nitai
- Tags: email marketing

[Nginx](http://wiki.nginx.org/?ref=helpmonks.com) is our favorite web server currently as it is fast, lean and easy to configure. Performance is just outstanding and if you haven’t take a look at it.

One thing that I noticed while we deployed Nginx with Tomcat is that their default size for the buffers are very low. Don’t know why a 4K buffer size would be sufficient. If you keep it at their default size and might have a heavy duty Tomcat app then it could be that you will see error messages like:

upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream  

The remedy for this error is to set the parameters for higher values for the proxy\_buffer\* parameters as we have done and now all is back to normal. Here are the current settings that worked well for us;

proxy\_buffer\_size 128k;  
proxy\_buffers 4 256k;  
proxy\_busy\_buffers\_size 256k;