fatal error

[kriss37]

I have installed a small "e-commerce" website, using MySql and php3 scripts about 2 weeks ago.
For the fist week, everything went perfectly well.
Now, for the past couple of days, i have a very big problem, since my pages are very very slow to appear, and i systematically get an error message ("Fatal error: Maximum execution time exceeded in your script on line... ")...
A lot of people have emailed me to tell me they were experiencing the same thing.
Now, my datebase is hosted at a professional hosting company (but they are not answering to my questions regarding this problem). If the scripts were working perfectly for a time, i doubt that the problem is coming from them...
So, my question is: where is the problem coming from? The hosting company? My database????
Please, please, let me know if you have any ideas, infos or whatever to share...
Thanks,
Christophe
P.S. Sorry for my terrible french english

[[deleted]]

Most likely your database is just too slow.

Make a test script that does what the other scripts do, but make it print the current time whenever it starts a query and whenever a query is finished.

Do you have indexes on your tables? did you work out a good database design?
Are you sure you are not doing "SELECT * FROM table" when you only need a few columns?
Are you using the LIMIT clause for every query that returns more results than you need?

In the meantime, you can get around the fatal error by increasing the time limit in your scripts:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php