Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a URL Shortener Service. When testing the ability to shorten really long urls (over 3500+ characters) I ran into an issue I had never seen before. When trying to redirect to the long url, NGINX would return a 502 error (upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream). After some research, I discovered the long url is sent in the header of the response. To fix this issue, I had to change the fastcgi_buffers and fastcgi_buffer_size setting in the location section of NGNIX.
fastcgi_buffers 16 16k; fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
If you are looking for a simple url shortener api service, you should check out t.ly.
