I've been playing around with a system I'm developing and managed to get it to cause this:
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded
It happened when I was doing something unrealistic, but nevertheless it could happen with a user.
Does anyone know if there is a way to catch this exception? I've read around but everyone seems to suggest upping the time allowed.
Your only options are to increase the allowed execution time (setting it to 0 makes it infinite, but that is not recommended) of the script or spawn a new thread and hope for the best.
The reason that this isn't catchable is that it isn't really thrown. No one line of the code actually triggered the error, rather PHP said, "Nope, sorry, this is too long. Time to shut down now." And that makes sense. Imagine having a script with a max execution time of 30 seconds catching that error and taking another 30 seconds... in a poorly designed program, that opens up some rather nasty opportunities to exploit. At a minimum, it will create opportunities for DOS attacks.