Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 400 seconds exceeded

Question

I have a PHP script that fails when executing a long mysq_query. The error message is:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 400 seconds exceeded in....

I use XAMPP for windows and I have changed the php.ini file (there is only one in my installation), setting max_execution_time to a large value that is not 400 seconds. Nevertheless I keep getting the error message above....

Any idea of how to solve this?

Thanks

Beto

Answer 1

As Ignacio says, something may be overriding the php.ini setting. You can definitively set the timeout for that script using set_time_limit

set_time_limit(600);

You can also set it to 0, which removes any time restriction - although this is not best practice.

400 seconds is a huge amount of time for a query - have you looked into adding indexes on commonly used columns in your db?

Answer 2

You need to restart your web server for PHP to re-parse your config file.

Answer 3

Something in either a .htaccess file or within a PHP script is probably resetting it back to 400 seconds.

Having said that, 400 seconds is still an excessive amount of time for a query. You should consider farming the task off to another process if it really needs to take that long.