WP-Engine 502 timeout- what options do I have to get around this limitation?
<p>We have a plugin for Wordpress that we've been using successfully on many customers- the plugin syncs stock numbers with our warehouse and exports orders to our warehouse.</p>

<p>We have recently had a client move to WP-Engine who seem to impose a hard 30 second limit on the length of a running request. Because sometimes we have many orders to export, the script simply hits a 502 bad gateway error.</p>

<p>According to WP-Engine documentation, this cannot be turned off on a client by client basis.</p>

<p><a href="https://wpengine.com/support/troubleshooting-502-error/" rel="nofollow">https://wpengine.com/support/troubleshooting-502-error/</a></p>

<p>My question is, what options do I have to get around a host's 30 second timeout limit? Setting <code>set_time_limit</code> has no effect (as expected as it is the web server killing the request, not PHP). The only thing I can think of is make heavy modifications to the plugin whereby it acts as an API and we simply pull the data from the clients system, however this is a last resort.</p>