How do you prevent an insert statement timing out?

I have a page where I have cleared the white space but have a feeling that things are not working correctly because it times out. Any solution on how to prevent this.

Edit my.cnf (the MySQL configuration file).

 vi /etc/my.cnf

Locate the timeout configuration and adjust it to fit your server. ex:

wait_timeout = 28800
interactive_timeout = 28800

restart server