Django Webfaction 'Timeout when reading response headers from daemon process'

Question

My Django app on my production server hosted on Webfaction was working fine until I just tried to restart it after pushing a change to the settings.py file. I ran

Answer 1

In my case (Python 3.6), the mimetypes module caused this problem. I did not further investigate this, but removing a call to mimetypes.guess_type solved the problem. The call was made in the related Django view function.

Answer 2

Try increasing Timeout directive in httpd.conf, which defaults to 60 seconds in Apache 2.4. For example:

TimeOut 600

Answer 3

Python C extension modules, like numpy, are known to cause timeouts when used under mod_wsgi. There's a clear explanation of the problem (direct from the author of mod_wsgi) available at https://serverfault.com/a/514251/109598

If that sounds like it might be the cause of your problem, then the solution is probably simple - add the following to your httpd.conf:

WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}

Be sure to restart your Apache instance after making that change.

Answer 4

Here is how I was able to find the root cause of my issue.

python manage.py showmigrations

My app could not reach the database server, so it would eventually time out. Running manage.py I could see see the error message on the console.