The only way I solved this out of interest is to downgrade my PHP version to 5.2.x

I tracked it down to locale-related settings and functions that didn't work with 5.3 - nothing to do with timeout per se, moreso that there was some problem running the locale-specific dates using iconv library or something like that. I looked into for a good few hours and gave up by reverting to PHP 5.2.

Hi,

I'm running 5.3 and dont have this problem.

The thing i did was install the locales i'm using in the OS.
I dont know what OS your webserver is running on but for Ubuntu and Debian i did the following (for installing the dutch locales):

ubuntu:

apt-get install language-pack-nl-base

debian (lenny):

apt-get install debconf
dpkg-reconfigure locales
.. nl_NL.utf8 istalleren

Hope this will help.

Just some more info: I recently moved to OS X Lion (language = English) and MAMP 2.0.1 and this issue turned up. Selecting PHP 5.2.17 in MAMP and everything works fine. But when selecting 5.3, I get this error message.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /Users/Menno/Sites/_245/sapphire/thirdparty/Zend/Locale/Format.php on line 665

Would it be possible to install a Dutch nl_NL language pack to OS X (as this is already part of the OS, right)?

I had this problem, using MAMP 1.9.5 on OSX Lion with PHP 5.3.5. I solved it by updating to MAMP 2.0.2, see this stackoverflow question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5400154/iconv-strlen-function-causing-execution-timeout-running-on-mamp

Confirmation: updating to 2.0.2 solved this issue.