Setting Curl's Timeout in PHP

I'm running a curl request on an eXist database through php. The dataset is very large, and as a result, the database consistently takes a long amount of time to return an XML response. To fix that, we set up a curl request, with what is supposed to be a long timeout. $ch = curl_init(); $headers["Content-Length"] = strlen($postString); $headers["User-Agent"] = "Curl/1.0"; curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $requestUrl); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'admin:'); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,1000); $response = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); However, the curl request consistently ends before the request is completed (<1000 when requested via a browser). Does anyone know if this is the proper way to set timeouts in curl?