How to avoid timeouts on real long page loads I have a few custom modules for our systems administrators where they can select a script and it will remotely execute on a remote server, let's say restart WebSphere.

I would like the results to display, however some of these scripts can take 15 minutes or so to run, I've got a busy spinner running so they know something is running in the back ground, however after 15 minutes or so the page times out, if you reload the page the results display.  

I display the results via drupal_set_message() in the "submit" hook.
The Drupal Batch API is a great solution for something like this. You can specify or count the number of actions that need to be done, display a progress bar, and prevent timeouts on long processes. Also there are many examples like this one you can utilize to create a good solution for your use-case.