Folks,
Some answers:
> I have a very complex database operation that can sometimes take
> 70-90
> seconds to return results. The web page which displays the results,
> however, seems to always timeout at 60seconds despite setting the
> Apache
> timeout to 300 seconds and set_time_limit to 240.
After a helpful web guru called us up from our post, we were able to
diagnose what's happening here (donation to be announced later):
Regardless of the Timeout and set_time_limit() settings, most browsers
will time out at 60 seconds.
This is obviously a huge annoyance. Therefore I am offering a *second*
charity prize to any person who can give me code (PHP or Perl) which
will display a "Processing" screen with an auto-reload to keep the
browser interested while waiting 60 to 120 seconds for a database
response in the background. *Someone* must have done this already, even
though multi-threading in PHP & Perl is nigh impossible.
-Josh Berkus