Drupal HEAD and HTTP 500 errors on IIS 7
Heine —Fri, 2009/01/09 - 12:41
If you use PHP via FastCGI on IIS 7 and installing Drupal HEAD (7.x-dev) results in an HTTP 500 error, you may need to increase a number of timeout settings. The PHP.ini ones are fairly straightforward, but setting the activityTimeout for the FastCGI module is not intuitive.
Open a Command prompt with Administrative rights and enter:
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:system.webServer/fastCgi /[fullPath='C:\path_to_cgi\php-cgi.exe'].activityTimeout:600
The path to cgi should be replaced with the path of the PHP binary you registered with IIS. You must wrap the path in additional double quotes if it contains spaces. Example:
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:system.webServer/fastCgi /[fullPath='"C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\php-cgi.exe"'].activityTimeout:600
To get easier access to such settings, install the Administration Pack for IIS: