As you might have noticed, 43things have been down for the count a few times since launch with nasty 500’s. The cause was the combination of default FCGI settings and a bad-ass RSS query that pulled out everything from the system at once and took up a couple of pages in the log.

That action couldn’t be rendered within the 30 second limit that FCGI imposes by default, so Apache suspended the connection to FCGI and caused hits to that particular FCGI process to go out of commission.

Lessons learned…

1. Make sure you don’t have any actions that take longer than the timeout limit in FCGI
2. Increase the default timeout limit if you have actions that you expect to take close to 30 seconds or more