Timeout - Category DropDowns and Crazy Long Forms

I recently ran into an issue that I couldn't figure out. With the help of Jamie we found our solution in an unexpected place.

I had approx. 7K categories broken down into multi-tier parent-child-subchild etc levels.

When I selected "Exclude Options" and chose "check all" of anything (I personally had Level1, Level2, Level3, Level4. The page would refresh and only about a quarter on the top of the list and an 8th at the end of the list were selected. Everything in between was still visible.

The solution happened to be in the PHP.ini file. If you're on HostGator, this is a simple fix.

Login through FTP (FileZilla is pretty awesome.) Usually the credentials are

Host: username@ftp.yourdomain.com
Username: your cPanel username
Password: your cPanel Password
Port: you can leave this blank. It defaults to 21 or 22, whichever is correct.

Go to the Top Level directory (the one identified by only a slash "/"

You'll see a PHP.ini file there.

Right click and select "view/edit". I'm a huge fan of Notepad++ for editing everything. So I set that as my default. (as I have a copy open in my editor, this is always a great time to rename the original PHP.ini.old or copy it to a safe location. whatever your approach - BACK UP THIS FILE

Scroll down to

post_max_size = 64M (this is already set)

add a line just below it

max_input_vars = 2000 ( I had to use a much higher number)

Save file, then FileZilla will prompt you to reload the edited page with the changes. Select yes. It will replace the one in the directory with your edited copy.

Refresh your form page and try again. My page reload indicator after making changes and hitting save spun for quite some time (5-10 minutes) afterwards, presto.

Note, the slowness I experienced saving the file was not experienced on the user end. Only for creation of the form.