Search was timing out

[DragonBlade]

Hey, peoples,

My members were experiencing a problem where a blank white page was returned when Searching for a post, and this was in the Apache error log:
PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /[mypath]/includes/functions.php on line 1822, referer: http://[myforums]/search.php

Looking on that line, it's a regular expression used in the strip_bbcode() function.

This post from several years ago is what I followed to "fix" the problem, but I think that it didn't really "fix" anything--it just made it so the regex doesn't match anything so it doesn't go through that loop to change anything. XP

I don't think that raising my max execution time would help matters much, and I really don't want to have to do that anyways. Could someone shed some light on this for me?

The original line in the file was:

PHP Code:

while(preg_match_all('#\[(\w+?)(?>[^\]]*?)\](.*)(\[/\1\])#siU', $message, $regs)) 


I just changed it to:

PHP Code:

while(preg_match_all('#\[(\w+?)(?>[^\]]*)\](.*)(\[/\1\])#siU', $message, $regs)) 


as was shown in that post I referenced. So I'm guessing, maybe it has something to do with greedy matching...? Maybe?

Has anyone else encountered this kind of error before with strip_bbcode()?