Error 524: a timeout occurred
Error 524 indicates that Cloudflare successfully connected to the origin web server, but the origin did not provide an HTTP response before the default 100 second connection timed out. This can happen if the origin server is simply taking too long because it has too much work to do - e.g. a large data query, or because the server is struggling for resources and cannot return any data in time.
Resolution
Here are the options we’d suggest to work around this issue:
- Implement status polling of large HTTP processes to avoid hitting this error.
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Contact your hosting provider to exclude the following common causes at your origin web server:
- A long-running process on the origin web server.
- An overloaded origin web server.
Logging request response time at your origin web server helps identify the cause of resource slowness. Contact your hosting provider or site administrator for assistance in adjusting log formats or search for related logging documentation for your brand of web server such as Apache or Nginx.
- Enterprise customers can increase the 524 timeout up to 6000 seconds using the proxy_read_timeout API endpoint.
- If you regularly run HTTP requests that take over 100 seconds to complete (for example large data exports), move those processes behind a subdomain not proxied (grey clouded) in the Cloudflare DNS app.
- If error 524 occurs for a domain using Cloudflare Railgun, ensure the lan.timeout is set higher than the default of 30 seconds and restart the railgun service.