The Unicorn test I ran disabled the passenger module and passed on requests via upstream in Nginx - but still returned a partial request. The only test that returns a full request is to bypass Nginx entirely and go direct to Unicorn. So based on this, it seems specific to my Nginx configuration. I find it hard to believe this is a generic defect in Nginx. It must be configuration related, right? Joe Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,236201,236206#msg-236206