如何在PHP中设置特定执行的超时？

Question

What I am trying to do is, I am running queries against Twitter and if the deliver of the result delays more than a specific time, than I want to say to user that "Please try again later, timeout." I am not asking the Twitter part, I told my story because of the initial explanation but I like to learn how to accomplish it with mostly PHP native codes.

What's in my mind would be something below:

startTimeout(callback(),3000);//Probably this function needs to start a new thread or another concurrent execution scope
//... initiating some twitter queries here

function callback()
{
   echo "Time out, sorry";
}

Answer 1

set_time_limit() should do the trick. This defines the number of seconds that the script can run.