Had a really interesting issue with a large SharePoint Farm instance we host… over the last couple of days when we tried to create a new Web Application the task was failing on the SharePoint Farm members. While being initially thrown off by a couple permission related event log entries for SharePoint Admin database access there was no clear indication of the problem or why it starting happening after weeks of no issues.

The symptoms being experienced was that from the Central Admin Web Site ->; Application Management ->; Manage Web Application page, creating a New Web Application would eventually return what looked like a HTTP timeout error. Looking at Central Admin page on both servers, it showed the Web Application as being present and created and the WSS file system was in place on both servers…however the IIS Application Pool and Website where only created on the server that ran the initial New Web Application. What’s better is that there where not event logs or SharePoint logs that logged the issue or cause.

In an attempt to try and see a little more verbose logging during the New Web Application process I ran up the new-SPWebApplication PowerShell command below:

New-SPWebApplication -Name “www.site.com.au443” -Port 443 -HostHeader “www.site.com.au” -URL “https://www.site.com.au” -ApplicationPool “www.site.com.au443” -ApplicationPoolAccount (Get-SPManagedAccount “DOMAIN\spAppPoolAcc”) -DatabaseServer MSSQL-01 -DatabaseName WSS_Content_Site -SecureSocketsLayer:$yes -Verbose

While the output wasn’t as verbose as I had expected, to my surprise the Web Application was created and functional on both servers in farm. After a little time together with Microsoft Support (focusing on permissions as the root cause for most of the time) we modified the Shutdown Time Limit setting under the Advanced Settings of the SharePoint Central Admin Application pool:

The Original value is set to 90 seconds by default. We raised this to 300 and tested the New Web Application function from the Web UI which this time was able to complete successfully. While it does make logical sense that a HTTP timeout was happening, the SharePoint farm wasn’t overly busy or under high resource load at the time, but still wasn’t able to complete the request in 90 seconds.

One to modify for all future/existing deployments.