Webmail works very slow or unavailable: Internal Server Error

Symptoms

• Webmail works very slow is unavailable or can not send email messages throwing the following error message:

  external Server Error

• The same error message is shown when searching through BODY in Roundcube webmail or in an attempt to send a email.

• The following entries can be found in the Apache log
/var/log/httpd/error_log:

  [warn] [client 203.0.113.2] mod_fcgid: read data timeout in 45 seconds, referer: http://webmail.example.com/roundcube/?_task=mail&_mbox=INBOX
  [error] [client 203.0.113.2] Premature end of script headers: index.php, referer: http://webmail.example.com/roundcube/?_task=mail&_mbox=INBOX
  [warn] mod_fcgid: process 16617 graceful kill fail, sending SIGKILL

Cause

Timeout FcgidIOTimeout has been exceeded.

FcgidIOTimeout is the maximum period of time the PHP-FastCGI module waits while trying to read from or write to a FastCGI application.

Resolution

1. Connect to the server via SSH

2. Open the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/fcgid.conf in any text editor and increase the value of FcgidIOTimeout to 90:

   # grep FcgidIOTimeout /etc/httpd/conf.d/fcgid.conf
   FcgidIOTimeout 90

   Note: For Debian-Based systems, path is /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/fcgid.conf.

3. Restart the Apache service:

   • For CentOS/RHEL-based distributions::

     # service httpd restart

   • For Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions:

     # service apache2 restart

4. If the issue still persists, increase the value of FcgidIOTimeout. If there are a lot of domains that use PHP served by FastCGI, consider switching a part of domains to PHP served by PHP-FPM to lower the load on FastCGI.

   For more information about how to switch PHP handlers, see Official Plesk documentation: Administrator's Guide: PHP Settings