Error: Apache2 - mod_fcgid: HTTP request length exceeds MaxRequestLen

You try to upload a file through http to your web site running on Apache2/PHP5/mod_fcgid, and in your browser you get the error:

Error 500, Internal server error

In Apache's error log you see something like

[Thu Jan 27 15:14:15 2011] [warn] [client 192.168.1.151] mod_fcgid: HTTP request length 131484 (so far) exceeds MaxRequestLen (131072), referer: ...

Solution

First check in your php.ini that upload_max_filesize has a big enough value for your upload. By default it's

upload_max_filesize = 2M

(2 MB)

Then open your Apache vhost configuration and add the FcgidMaxRequestLen directive with a big enough value (in bytes), for example

FcgidMaxRequestLen 2000000

which equals roughly 2 MB.

The default value is

FcgidMaxRequestLen 131072

which is very small (see http://httpd.apache.org/mod_fcgid/mod/mod_fcgid.html#fcgidmaxrequestlen).

Finally restart Apache.