An operation or a script that takes more than 60 seconds to complete fails on a website hosted in Plesk: nginx 504 Gateway Time-out

Symptoms 

• An operation or a script that takes more than 60 seconds to complete fails on a website with the following error in a web-browser:

  nginx 504 Gateway Time-out

• The following error message appears on the Logs page (Domains > example.com > Logs) or in the domain's nginx error logfile
/var/www/vhosts/system/example.com/logs/proxy_error_log:

  [error] 1096#0: *25 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 203.0.113.2, server: example.com, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:///var/www/vhosts/system/example.com/php-fpm.sock", host: "example.com"

Cause

The default timeout limit is 60 seconds for proxying requests from nginx to Apache.

Resolution

If a script takes more than 60 seconds to execute, increase the timeout limit.

1. Log in to Plesk.

2. Go to Domains > example.com > Apache & nginx Settings.

3. Add the following lines to the Additional nginx directives field to increase the timeout limit to 180 seconds (3 minutes):

   proxy_connect_timeout 180s;
   proxy_send_timeout 180s;
   proxy_read_timeout 180s;
   fastcgi_send_timeout 180s;
   fastcgi_read_timeout 180s;

4. Apply the changes.