Question

We are developing a service that needs to respond within 50ms AND it needs a good SLA, i.e. must always be live and responsive.

Question – is it possible to set a default response (e.g. respond with blank JSON object) to use in case of web server (nginx or Apache) timeout? If so – how to do this?

I could add this to the application logic but setting it at the server level would be more fail-proof.

Answer 1

You can use the error_page directive.

E.g.:

error_page 502 504 =200 @blank_json;

location @blank_json {
    return 200 "{}";
}