AWS EC2 Django Deployment — Getting 504 Gateway Timeout (Gunicorn worker timeout & SIGKILL)

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🚨 AWS EC2 Django Deployment — Getting 504 Gateway Timeout (Gunicorn worker timeout & SIGKILL)

Hi everyone,

I deployed my Django application on AWS EC2 (t3.micro) using Nginx + Gunicorn.
The deployment completes successfully, but when I open my website, I get:

504 Gateway Timeout

I checked my server logs and found these repeated errors:

Gunicorn worker timeouts

Workers getting SIGKILL

“worker failed to boot” messages

Requests taking too long (60s, 120s, even more)

Nginx logs showing unreadable / binary request garbage (likely bot traffic)

From logs, it looks like:

Gunicorn workers are timing out

Or system is running out of memory (1GB RAM on t3.micro)

After timeout, workers crash → Load Balancer gets no response → 504

My Setup:

AWS EC2 t3.micro

Ubuntu 22.04

Django + Gunicorn + Nginx

Postgres RDS

No Redis / Celery yet

Gunicorn is running via systemd

What I need help with:

How to properly configure Gunicorn for a t3.micro instance?

How to avoid worker timeout / SIGKILL?

Should I reduce workers or increase timeout?

Should I upgrade the instance or add SWAP?

Any recommended production config for low-memory servers?

Any guidance or working configs will be very helpful.
Thank you!

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