A Fool’s Wisdom

PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 0 seconds exceeded

Lately, I have been working with some big blog exports from Movable Type and TypePad. I was thankful to notice Mark Jaquith recently patched the WordPress MT importer to allow uploading the import file directly (ftp, scp) and then run the import against the file already on the server.

In my vanilla development Ubuntu 7.04 environment¹, 150 of 1500 posts in, on one with a lot of comments it failed with

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/wp/trunk/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 74

Ok, so I updated max_execution_time = 0 , and 150 posts it fails again, this time with

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 0 seconds exceeded in /var/www/wp/trunk/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 141

Maximum execution time of 0 seconds exceeded?! 0 is supposed to be for unlimited. I have been to infinity and beyond!

Thanks to verysimple.com’s blog I found out that the error is misreported and the real problem is now max_input_time . I don’t know how I would have figured this out if others had not shared it!

Setting this also to zero and the import was successful (though slow). I did not trust that there would not be any duplicates or partial entries, so I cleaned out the content and did it one more time.

1. libapache2-mod-php5 5.2.1-0ubuntu1.2 [↩]