I was having a problem creating a new SPWebApplication through Central Admin in SharePoint. It would run for a fair while – longer than I’m used to as this machine seems quite slow – and then I’d be shown the IE ‘timeout’ page within the ‘Create Web App’ iframe. The Web App seemed to have created, including creation of the IIS app pool and site, but they never worked correctly – for example, on different attempts I couldn’t:

• See the web application’s settings in central admin
• Create a Site collection
• Login to a site collection that had created successfully, despite being site collection admin.

Fortunately, I’m not the first person to have seen this. Some folks suggest using PowerShell to provision the web application – which I’m guessing doesn’t suffer IIS timeouts – and others suggest increasing the time outs on the application pool itself. I set:

• Ping Maximum Response Time
• Shutdown Time Limit
• Startup Time Limit

… to 900 (instead of 90), I was able to create and successfully access my new site collection!