I had many timeout problems with phpfreechat 1.3 after upgrading from 1.2. Since there seemed to be no solution, I just downgraded to 1.2 and things work fine again. There are still some timeouts, but they happen because of a bad internet connection quality (3G mobile internet, for example). With 1.3 there were timeouts with excellent internet connections too (with different browsers). There is not a big difference between the features of phpfreechat 1.2 and 1.3 and all of the contributions I've seen so far work just fine with 1.2, so I have not seen any reason to try 1.3 again.