exec from php is causing an “Premature end of script headers: php-cgi.exe” error

Question

I have a php script written which calls an external command using exec which compiles a spacial database query result into a shape file. In tables with lots of records (say

Answer 1

Apparently, the default httpd.conf file included in Apache 2.4 doesn't automatically include the extra file httpd-default.conf under /conf/extra (probably by design), which includes the timeout parameter. Since the timeout parameter isn't defined, it reverts back to the default value of 30 seconds, and your script(s) time out.

I did the following to resolve it:

• Opened httpd.conf and added the following line to the bottom:

Include conf/extra/httpd-default.conf

• Restarted Apache, and it worked.

An alternative would be to simply add the following line(s) to the httpd.conf file:

Timeout 300
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 5

Hope this helps someone out there :)