Sometimes you might have some time-consuming tasks to perform on PhpMyAdmin (I assume for some reasons, you do not have the access to MySQL command-line tools, which is much faster), but the web-based app does not let you get what you wanted because of the limit in execution time.

Basically, a PHP script will be executed for a limited time set by php.ini directive max_execution_time (default = 30 seconds). However, PhpMyAdmin uses its own configuration value. That is why you cannot simply increase the value in php.ini file to tell PhpMyAdmin to run longer.

After a while, I figured out where and what to set the configuration value for PhpMyAdmin. You need to open the file config.inc.php in PhpMyAdmin root director and add the following line:

$cfg['ExecTimeLimit'] = 300;

where, 300 is the number of seconds you want the scrip to execute. For unlimited execution time, leave it as 0.

That is all you need to leave PhpMyAdmin with more time to perform tasks like export or import. In my case, I needed to export a table with about 20 Mil records.

Please feel free to leave comments. Cheers!

References http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1263680/maximum-execution-time-in-phpmyadmin