Error with SOAP - Error Fetching http headers

[bluntbill]

I have a server which provides SOAP services, and another server (let's call it client) in which I access the services.

when the clients accesses a soap service on the server, the server does some processing using shell_exec. This sometimes takes more than 60 seconds. I am mentioning the time, because it seems to me that the problem may be related with that.

When the client request takes 60seconds, I get a error:

SoapFault Object ( [messagerotected] => Error Fetching http headers (...)

I have tried setting this on the soap client options:

"connection_timeout" => 600

but it does not solve the problem.

I have also tried unsetting the time execution limit on both the php scripts of the client and server:

set_time_limit(0);

but it does not solve the problem.

The last thing I tried was changing php.ini in both servers, changing the max input time:

max_input_time = 120

This doesn't seem to do the work because the script keeps failing with the soap error after 60 seconds.

If I flush() the data before executing the process at the server, the error at the client changes to "Error Fetching http body" or something like this.

Does anyone have a clue on why this error happens or how to fix/avoid this?

thanks in advance.