Timeout settings

One of my clients has recently started getting constant timeout errors on their website. No changes have been made to the scripts.

The hosting company say the timeout setting on the server is set to 10 seconds. Does this seem unusually low? I expected it to be 20 or 30.

yes this is unusual and pretty low. I guess you mean Script Timeout, not
session timeout, by the way?
anyway, while it's not recommended to have script running for more than
10 seconds, it still can happen when you got lots of data to process, and
in my opinion good host should give more than 10 seconds.

I had alot of problems with a couple of scripts that were processing loads of data from excel and uploading it to db server.

I gradually increased server.scripttimeout= to a higher value until I could get it to run successfully.

Don't know if that would help in your case.

I suspect his host simply decided to have server.scripttimeout of 10 seconds
and it's hard to believe they would let him make it bigger..

I don't know. I thought the timeout set on the server was the default, but you can change it manually by using server.scripttimeout= in your script.

I think I got that from the error message I was getting. Something like either change the setting on your server or increase server.scripttimeout.

Like I say, it worked for me when my scripts were timing out..

Thanks for your posts guys and sorry I haven't responded sooner.

From what the hosting company told me it sounds like some users were using excessive space/bandwidth, causing the server to respond very slowly. They moved the site to a clean server and it works fine.

Cheers, Better Late Than Never, you know..
Anyway, sounds like typical free host: saving money by pushing as much
users as possible into single server.
I hope you didn't pay for that kind of hosting??