Why does Nginx return 499 errors?
I noticed something unexpected in my nginx logs today: There were a bunch of 499 HTTP codes in the access log. Oddly, these didn't show up in Google Analytics, there were no corresponding errors in the error log, but they did show up in my AWStats. What's the deal?
The answer is pretty simple: Nginx uses 499 as the status code when the client unexpectedly terminates a connection. (Thus the client may have already received a 200 in the header, AFAIK). This is consistent with the usage of 4xx errors as indicating a client error condition.
A quick calculation showed me that the 499s accounted for only 0.2% of our total traffic. Not bad. And in fact, I sorta like the ability to see how many times clients terminated connections to my server. <!--break-->
