Installing and upgrading help

I raised the level of PHP error reporting and got multiple timeout errors

PHP Fatal error:  Maximum execution time of 300 seconds exceeded
...lib\weblib.php
...lib\classes\session\handler.php
...lib\external\externallib.php


I upped the max_execution_time to 600 seconds and it loaded the page. (only worked once - timed-out on 2 other attempts after that)
I noticed that the course i was testing it with had ~1100 participants, so that might have been exasperating issue.

I tested another course with 30 participants and this time the page took 11 seconds to load.

That still seems somewhat excessive. (also the 'Saving changes...' text never disappears)
From what I remember, in the development discussion they had courses with 300 participants load in a shorter time period then that.