I've written a short script that takes a user uploaded .csv and downloads images from the web (column A), renames them by a barcode (column B), and then zips those images and downloads it for the user.

The script works fine if the .csv only has 10-100 rows, but the client is wanting to upload a .csv with 1000s of rows and we're now getting server timeout errors (as expected).

I set the max execution time to 0:

ini_set('max_execution_time', '0');

But that didn't do the trick.

The end goal is to simply download all the images and rename them by the barcodes. I thought about maybe splitting the task into multiple chunks of 100 images or so, but even then, I don't know how to get around a server timeout.

Does anyone have any suggestions or workarounds for a way to achieve something like this?