Question

Apache2 on Ubuntu 18.10 all sites respond with ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE (ping works)

Hi everyone,

I recently installed several applications on an Ubuntu 18.10 droplet. They work fine for a while, but after a few minutes I start getting errors on all requests to the applications:

This page isn’t working xxx.com didn’t send any data. ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE

However, if I ping the sites they respond correctly.

If I do a sudo tail /var/log/apache2/error.log I get the following errors all the time:

[Sun Mar 24 23:07:32.431672 2019] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 877:tid 139937659733760] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 2605:de00:1:1:4a:4a:0:2:51906] AH01075: Error dispatching request to : (polling)

I tried restarting Apache, rebooting the droplet… but I don’t know what I’m missing, Any ideas?

Thanks in advance


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

jarland
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
March 25, 2019
Accepted Answer

Greetings!

It looks like you’re using mod_fcgid, and the back-end application is not responding before the timeout value. Raising the timeout is certainly an option, and it can be a stand-in solution for the moment, but I have a problem with calling it “the” solution. If a timeout has to be extended to load a website, then I propose that said website needs to have it’s code reviewed for performance issues. You want your website to be fast, and this is evidence that it is not.

With that said, let’s go ahead with the idea of increasing the timeout. I do not know what configurations you’ve made, so I will suggest doing this to identify where the configurations may be:

grep -R "Fcgid" /etc/apache2

This should reveal what files have that string in them. You may find many different variables with timeout values assigned. You can find a reference to each one of these variables and how they can be configured here:

https://httpd.apache.org/mod_fcgid/mod/mod_fcgid.html

Jarland

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel