Default Gateway Time-out on checkout page

Question

I am getting this error when I try to check out ,any help would be greatly appreciated

Gateway Time-out

The gateway did not receive a timely response from the upstream server or application.

Thanks

Answer 1

It means that PHP has failed to respond in the timeouts specified by your web server.

I would assume you are using Nginx, in which case rather than list the 10 or so settings that need refining (and not blindly changing), my recommendation would be to move to something simpler like Apache with mod_PHP, or to not DIY your hosting if you don't fully understand what you are doing.

The reason as to why PHP might be slow could be down to a multitude of factors, the most likely is that your var/cache directory has grown too large and that the conditional purges during checkout are taking too long to process.