In progressIngress returns 504 Gateway Time-out under load504 from ingress-nginx means nginx itself gave up waiting for (or never found) a working backend — it's not the backend actively returning an error. The exact log message splits this into two genuinely different causes.
View the whole map (7 more steps)
Check the ingress-controller's error log for the exact upstream message
Is the backend genuinely slow, or is nginx's timeout just too low for it?
Fix: raise this Ingress's proxy-read/send-timeout
Root cause: backend contention under load, not a timeout setting
Are the backend pods actually Ready?
Root cause: the Service has no Ready backend pods
Root cause: endpoints exist but traffic can't reach them
What to test
Ingress returns 504 Gateway Time-out under load
504 from ingress-nginx means nginx itself gave up waiting for (or never found) a working backend — it's not the backend actively returning an error. The exact log message splits this into two genuinely different causes.