What can I do to fix a 504 gateway timeout error?

Question

I have been using jquery to try and pull data from an API. However I am getting a 504 error. Even when I am using postman to test the data this happens. Can anyone suggest what I need to do to get around this?

Answer 1

I recently experienced this issue on one of my app's that was making an ambitious call to it's Firebase Database - it was grabbing a very large record, which took over 60 seconds (the default timeout) to retrieve.

For those experiencing this error, that have access to their app / site's hosting environment, which is proxying through NGINX, this issue can be fixed by extending the timeout for API requests.

In your /etc/nginx/sites-available/default or /etc/nginx/nginx.conf add the following variables:

proxy_connect_timeout       240;
proxy_send_timeout          240;
proxy_read_timeout          240;
send_timeout                240;

Run sudo nginx -t to check the syntax, and then sudo service nginx restart.

This should effectively quadruple the time before NGINX will timeout your API requests (the default being 60 seconds, our new timeout being 240 seconds).

Hope this helps!