When you use ab to do some performance benchmarking, you might run into output like this:

Complete requests:      200
Failed requests:        5
   (Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 5, Exceptions: 0)

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Note that in our example these "Failed requests" actually never failed.\
For some requests, the application just returned a response with a different content length than the first response. This is indicated by the "Length: 5" bit in the example above.

If you see requests that failed with other kinds of errors, they probably failed for real.