Prevent nginx 504 Gateway timeout using PHP set_time_limit()

Question

I am getting 504 timeouts message from nginx when my PHP script is running longer than usual. set_time_limit(0) does not seem to prevent that! Does it not work when running php5-fpm on nginx? If so, whats the proper way of setting the time limit?

Error:

504 Gateway Time-out
nginx/1.2.7

Answer 1

There are several ways in which you can set the timeout for php-fpm. In /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf I added this line:

request_terminate_timeout = 180

Also, in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default I added the following line to the location block of the server in question:

fastcgi_read_timeout 180;

The entire location block looks like this:

location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 180;
    include fastcgi_params;
} 

Now just restart php-fpm and nginx and there should be no more timeouts for requests taking less than 180 seconds.