Intensive PHP script failing w/ “The timeout specified has expired” error / ap_content_length_filter

Question

Running a MySQL intensive PHP script that is failing. Apache log reports this:

[Wed Jan 13 00:20:10 2010] [error] [client xxx.xx.xxx.xxxx] (70007)
The timeou         


        

Answer 1

I suspect I'm getting the same error, updated for a later version of Apache (2.4.16):

[Tue Aug 02 11:49:41.930884 2016] [core:error] [pid 28640] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxxx] AH00574: ap_content_length_filter: apr_bucket_read() failed, referer: https://domain.com/script.php

I was wondering why increasing max_execution_time in php.ini wasn't working.

For me, the fix was simply increasing the Timeout directive in httpd.conf https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#timeout

Timeout 900

(Or in WHM -> Apache Configuration -> Global Configuration, as the case may be)

This timeout applies to time between IO events. So even though the script was outputting data almost immediately, a long delay in the middle of the script's execution was causing the timeout.