The 502 bad gateway error tends to mean that there has been or is currently a communication issue between the client web interface and an up stream server, in this case it would indicate an issue communicating with the Columbus server.
The last time I encountered the issue we were able to attribute it to too many python processes running which was effectively blocking communication between the clients and the Columbus server.
Typically you might only expect to see 4 or 5 python manage.py processes running at any one time, and you should certainly not have any more than 10. If this is the case then it's likely there are some 'stale' or stalled processes that need killing - as was the case for me.
A simple workaround for this is to just restart the Columbus web component:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/columbus restart web
This would bring the server back up but it didn't help with root cause analysis. You might wish to try the following workflow to verify that it's the same issue:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/columbus stop web
# now check if there are any "python manage.py..." processes still alive
$ ps -fU columbus
# if in this output list there are "python manage.py..." processes still listed, kill
them manually:
$ sudo kill
# start columbus web again
$ sudo /etc/init.d/columbus start web
If the error goes away then this suggests that it's the number of python manage.py processes that is causing the issue.
The problem with this approach is that it mean that any users currently logged in would potentially lose their work e.g. if building an analysis BB routine.
Alternatively it might be sufficient for you to kill the stale "python manage.py...." processes from time to time. You can identify these stale processes by looking at the output of:
$ ps -fU columbus
As described here:
http://forums.cambridgesoft.com/messageview.aspx?catid=55&threadid=3485&enterthread=y
Following on from that you might then just need to filter out those older processes using a similar workflow as described here:
http://forums.cambridgesoft.com/messageview.aspx?catid=55&threadid=3486&enterthread=y
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RAH