Maximum execution time exceeded - Error in PHP

You might have come across a Fatal error stating Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded when running time consuming PHP scripts. Well, PHP sets its default maximum execution time for a script to 30 seconds so that the server is not overloaded running long scripts. But there are times when you need to run some time consuming scripts that does some database maintenance or processing large amounts of data. In such cases you are likely to exceed the 30 seconds time limit. PHP has a built in function set_time_limit which can be used to change the maximum execution time.