Why does the system lock up for half a minute and then show an error page?

This is a pretty broad question, and I'm going to provide a pretty broad answer.

The server is set up so that if it takes longer than 30 seconds to do something, whatever was being done will be killed off. This is to prevent the case where a bug causes the server to run around in circles indefinitely, and preventing anything else being done.

One of the more costly exercises is generating PDF documents, so you're mostly likely to run into this problem when you're generating large reports. You can also run into it if you specify search criteria that result in tens of thousands of matching items (although if the search results in 30,000 or more results, the system will tell you that there are too many results).

There are a couple of cases where I've suspended this rule:

• when you're generating component reports;
• when you're generating property detail reports;
• when you're generating the component data table;
• when you're generating supp detail reports; or,
• when you're generating a land value distribution report.

These exceptions have all been applied because either I have run into the limitations, or other people have. If you find that this is causing you grief, please let me know about it.