Why Nginx Shows “worker process is shutting down” and How to Fix It
The article explains how a new WebSocket domain caused Nginx worker processes to repeatedly shut down, leading to timeout alerts, and provides step‑by‑step investigation methods and a configuration fix using the worker_shutdown_timeout directive.
Problem: In production, the website API monitoring reported many timeout alerts because a large number of Nginx worker processes were repeatedly shutting down.
Investigation steps:
Check for abnormal attacks (public SLB bandwidth usage, Nginx logs).
Inspect server and service status (CPU usage, ps -ef|grep nginx).
Observe many “worker process is shutting down” entries.
Root Cause Analysis
The new domain introduced a WebSocket long‑connection. When Nginx performed a hot reload, the existing long‑connections were not terminated, causing the reload to wait indefinitely and saturating system load.
Solution
In nginx.conf add worker_shutdown_timeout 10; to limit the shutdown wait time.
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