If you’re getting 502 Bad Gateways from your WordPress site when using Nginx then the following cron job might help:

Add a .sh script with this content and set it to trigger every ten minutes:

#!/bin/bash
PHPCOUNT=`ps aux | grep ‘.php.sock’ | grep ‘php5.cgi’ | wc -l`
echo $PHPCOUNT
while [ “$PHPCOUNT” -eq 0 ]
do
/etc/init.d/nginx startphp
PHPCOUNT=`ps aux | grep ‘.php.sock’ | grep ‘php5.cgi’ | wc -l`
done

That should check the number of processes, and if it’s not correct restart them.

The script is /root/nginx_php.sh

The cronjob is installed under root, and this is the content:

ps19952:/var/spool/cron/crontabs# crontab -l
MAILTO=””
*/10     *       *       *       *       /bin/sh /root/nginx_php.shps19952:/var/spool/cron/crontabs#