PHP - sometimes timeouts while accessing Magento via SOAP - soap

Question

I've got a simple script which should:
1. Get all customers from Magento (into an array)
2. Get their full addresses (iterate through the array with a foreach)
2a. sleep for 3 sec
3. Get their order history (same foreach)
3a. sleep once more for 3 sec
I'm doing this from the command line with PHP CLI.
The script runs for a couple of minutes - sometimes even half an hour but most often the script sees an error and can't fully iterate through all data:
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [HTTP] Could not connect to host in /var/www/soap/mag_crm.php:162
Stack trace:
#0 [internal function]: SoapClient->__doRequest('<?xml version="...', 'http://myurl...', 'urn:Mage_Api_Mo...', 1, 0)
#1 /var/www/soap/mag_crm.php(162): SoapClient->__call('salesOrderList', Array)
#2 /var/www/soap/mag_crm.php(162): SoapClient->salesOrderList('fd66fc18e4b8...', Array)
#3 /var/www/soap/mag_crm.php(85): fetchAllOrders(259)
#4 {main}
thrown in /var/www/soap/mag_crm.php on line 162
How could I improve this script or in case of an error like this - just retry or so?
The code itself is easy - just plain function calls like that for instance:
$aOrders = fetchAllOrders ( $oCustomer->customer_id );
(within the foreach)

Answer 1

you need to change your magento settings to :
System -> Index Management
Check All Items
Change Action to "Change Index Mode"
Select "Manual"
Save
The problem is that the site tries to refresh the picture all the time and kill the session.