Error 524 A timeout occurred

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This article will talk about what Error 524 is. It indicates that the requested resource (site) is unavailable. There are special services to monitor the online status of a site and assess site accessibility.

One of these services is the BAILRY service – a free regular (periodic) website accessibility check. This service also has a paid subscription for constant monitoring of site availability.

Error 524 occurs when a connection has been established with the web server, but it has not responded within the configured connection timeout period. The HTTP response timeout on CloudFlare is 100 seconds. If the web server did not provide a response, the system will issue a 524 error.

Main reasons:

  • Long running PHP process or database query;
  • The web server is overloaded. Check the server’s available resources, including processor and RAM.

Recommendations for fixing error 524

Contact your hosting provider to rule out the following common causes on your origin web server:

  • Long-running process on the origin web server.
  • Overloaded origin web server.

Logging the request response time on the origin web server can help determine why resources are slowing down. Contact your hosting provider or site administrator for help setting up log formats, or find the appropriate log documentation for your brand of web server, such as Apache or Nginx.

If you regularly make HTTP requests that take more than 100 seconds to complete (for example, when exporting large amounts of data), move these processes behind a subdomain that is not proxied (grayed out) in the Cloudflare DNS application.

If error 524 occurs for a domain using Cloudflare Railgun, ensure that lan.timeout is set above the default 30 seconds and restart the railgun service.

Finally, it is important to note that the trust of clients and users in your website, as well as your position in search engines, directly depend on the availability of your resource (website) at any given time.

And you can control this availability using the BAILRY service – a unique software product that has no analogues on the market. To stay informed, sign up for a free regular (periodic) website accessibility check today!