Question

I have developed a program in PHP which opens IE on a button click. I have used the function

system("C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IE.EXE");

But then after successful program execution I get the error:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

by default php has a 60 second time limit on scripts running (incase you create an infinite loop or other things like that) so they dont keep running forever

often long running database queries can easily exceed 60sec

if your script does need more then 60secs and is working as expected, then you can use set_time_limit(n) where n = number of seconds. so 1 hour would be set_time_limit(3600)

http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php

also as noted in the php manual (for system() function)

If a program is started with this function, in order for it to
continue running in the background, the output of the program must be
redirected to a file or another output stream. Failing to do so will
cause PHP to hang until the execution of the program ends.

I would expect, this is what is happening for you