The default timeout for FCGID is pretty low I think (maybe 5-10 seconds). This was causing me SO much grief that I was just about to lose it. I found these posts out there that helped a lot:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Debian+mod_fastcgi+Notes
http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2005/01/03/watch-for-huge-requests-on-default-fcgi
Of course Ubuntu uses different config locations and such for FCGID, but the configuration names are the same.
I set my timeouts to 2 minutes just to be safe. Besides for an admin application, I could wait for a long time without thinking things were amiss. Anyways, help that helps prevent some folks from losing their minds.
Invert your Mind 
psst…use mongrel – fastcgi is painful enogh to configure, and (for me at least) it was dog slow compared to running a mongrel cluster.
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Took a look and since I’m going to be adding SSL, Mongrel looks just as hard to configure as FastCGI. I still have to use Apache, plus starting up a number of Mongrel instances, and mod balancer. Am I missing something? Or is the goal speed? Is Mongrel like uber fast?
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He’s not using mod_fastcgi–he’s using mod_fcgid, a completely different beast, which happens to be much more stable and more scalable (than both fastcgi and mongrel, in my experience.)
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