Troubleshooting and Increasing Gunicorn Timeout in a Django Application

Introduction

In this article, we will go through the process of troubleshooting and resolving a Gunicorn worker timeout issue in a Django application. We will cover how to locate the Gunicorn configuration, increase the timeout value, and apply the changes to the running service.

Problem

A Django application was running on an Ubuntu server using Gunicorn. The application was working fine locally, but on the server, it experienced a worker timeout issue.

Solution

To resolve the worker timeout issue, we increased the Gunicorn timeout value. Here's a step-by-step guide on how we did it:

1. Locate the Gunicorn configuration file:
   We searched for the Gunicorn configuration file using the find command. In this case, the configuration was contained within the systemd service file itself, rather than in a separate configuration file.

2. Update the timeout value in the Gunicorn configuration:
   We modified the ExecStart line in the service file to include the --timeout option and set the desired timeout value (e.g., 120 seconds).

Example configuration:

[Service]
User=dev
WorkingDirectory=/home/dev/django_app

ExecStart=/home/dev/prod/django_app/bin/gunicorn
--access-logfile -
--workers 3
--timeout 120
--bind unix:/run/gunicorn.sock
django_project.wsgi:application

1. Reload the systemd configuration and restart the Gunicorn service: After updating the service file, we reloaded the systemd configuration and restarted the Gunicorn service with the following commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart gunicorn

Conclusion

By increasing the Gunicorn timeout value, we successfully resolved the worker timeout issue in the Django application. This process can be applied to other similar situations where a Gunicorn worker timeout is causing problems in a Django application. Remember to adjust the timeout value according to your requirements and optimize your application to prevent such issues in the future.