FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout in IIS 7

By richard | 12th July 2010

Problem with large Kayako eSupport database causing FastCGI process to exceed activity timeout doing a Creator/Replier search

Problem

A customer with a very large Kayako eSupport database reported problems when using the ticket search by Creator/Replier. A search for a common name, such as ‘david’ returned results in a few seconds but searching for a less common term, e.g. ‘alvin’ would time out after around 90 seconds.

On client browsers this produces a 503 error. Software is running on Windows Server 2008 R2 using FastCGI. On the server the error is “The FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout”.

Solution

The solution, not surprisingly, is to increase the activity timeout. However the way to do this is different with IIS7. You need to use appcmd, the single command line tool for managing IIS 7, to modify the IIS configuration XML file.

To check the current settings use: –

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd list config -section:system.webServer/fastCgi

To add the activity timeout (assuming CGI location is C:\php\php-cgi.exe): –

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:system.webServer/fastCgi /[fullPath=’C:\php\php-cgi.exe’].activityTimeout:600

This should now be similar to this: –

 

References

We found the solution here: http://forums.iis.net/t/1076662.aspx, together with information regarding modifying fcgiext.ini for earlier versions of IIS. Look for the post by gutch on 06-19-2008, 1:37 AM.

 

 

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