Bad Gateway 502 error with Apache mod_proxy and Tomcat
Just to add some specific settings, I had a similar setup (with Apache 2.0.63 reverse proxying onto Tomcat 5.0.27).
For certain URLs the Tomcat server could take perhaps 20 minutes to return a page.
I ended up modifying the following settings in the Apache configuration file to prevent it from timing out with its proxy operation (with a large over-spill factor in case Tomcat took longer to return a page):
Timeout 5400
ProxyTimeout 5400
Some backgound
ProxyTimeout alone wasn't enough. Looking at the documentation for Timeout I'm guessing (I'm not sure) that this is because while Apache is waiting for a response from Tomcat, there is no traffic flowing between Apache and the Browser (or whatever http client) - and so Apache closes down the connection to the browser.
I found that if I left the Timeout setting at its default (300 seconds), then if the proxied request to Tomcat took longer than 300 seconds to get a response the browser would display a "502 Proxy Error" page. I believe this message is generated by Apache, in the knowledge that it's acting as a reverse proxy, before it closes down the connection to the browser (this is my current understanding - it may be flawed).
The proxy error page says:
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET.
Reason: Error reading from remote server
...which suggests that it's the ProxyTimeout setting that's too short, while investigation shows that Apache's Timeout setting (timeout between Apache and the client) that also influences this.
So, answering my own question here. We ultimately determined that we were seeing 502 and 503 errors in the load balancer due to Tomcat threads timing out. In the short term we increased the timeout. In the longer term, we fixed the app problems that were causing the timeouts in the first place. Why Tomcat timeouts were being perceived as 502 and 503 errors at the load balancer is still a bit of a mystery.