[RESOLVED] script timing out - any way of stopping it?

mfacer

Hi..
I have a script which is rather complex.... it gets members from a DB and performs calculations on each one... around 200 times each. This obviously takes a long time - but its causing the script to time out. I've change PHP.ini to allow it - but my client also gets the following message:

CGI Timeout
The specified CGI application exceeded the allowed time for processing. The server has deleted the process.

The calculation performs the calculations and using the BiffWriter (Excel creator) it makes an excel spreadsheet with all the data.

Is there any way of stopping the script timing out? I've never seen the CGI error message before.

Thanks for any advice....

toplay

Use set_time_limit() in your script.

Pay particular attention to this from the manual:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php wrote:
When called, set_time_limit() restarts the timeout counter from zero. In other words, if the timeout is the default 30 seconds, and 25 seconds into script execution a call such as set_time_limit(20) is made, the script will run for a total of 45 seconds before timing out.

Also, double-check your code to see if you can make improvements. Like possibly letting MySQL do a lot of the calculations for you. Make sure you're not stuck in an infinite loop, etc.

hth.

mfacer

thanks for the reply - I never knew about that function!
The calculations are based on numbers from another table in the database - so there's not much sql can actually do - its all PHP calcs... I'll see if the code can be made any "lighter" 🙂 thanks again

toplay

mfacer wrote:
...The calculations are based on numbers from another table in the database - so there's not much sql can actually do...

I'm glad to help. I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but so what if the numbers are in another MySQL table. You can do so much in SQL! You can use various arithmetic expressions and math functions and join tables together (and can do sub-queries if you have MySQL version 4.1+).

Joins tutorial:
http://www.keithjbrown.co.uk/vworks/mysql/mysql_p5.shtml

FYI - MySQL manual pages:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/mathematical-functions.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/arithmetic-functions.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/group-by-functions.html

Join syntax:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/join.html

Sub-query:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/subqueries.html

Also, if you can do more in SQL it helps because SQL does not eat up time from your scripts execution time out limit:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php wrote:
The set_time_limit() function and the configuration directive max_execution_time only affect the execution time of the script itself. Any time spent on activity that happens outside the execution of the script such as system calls using system(), stream operations, database queries, etc. is not included when determining the maximum time that the script has been running.

Good luck.

🙂

toplay

FYI - I updated my previous post ---/\

mfacer

cool - thanks very much for the links - just rewriting the script now with some joins hopefully working soon!! 🙂