When I am running ab on my website I get a ton of these responses: SSL read failed - closing connection SSL read failed - closing connection SSL read failed - closing connection And some times it is successful. I am on a MacBook Pro 10.7.2. What is weird is, someone else does the same test on a very simular machine, not OS Lion, right next to me and has no problems. Any ideas? I am sure this is something on my machine because I get ab to work all over the place. The command is simply: ab -c 100 -n 1000 https://mywebsite.com One other thing, when I look in the nginx logs, I do see some requests coming in from the ab so it is working some. And also, the logs do not show the failed ones.