Long Execution Time - Safe Mode

Hello. I have a script which updates some database by loading information from external websites. For example, it has a table of website addresses, and it updates their HTML source on the database. I am using cronjobs to activate the script every 8 hours. The problem is the server I am running my script on has SAFE MODE ON, which prevents me from changing the max_execution_time or memory limit. I talked with the server-owner and he changed the max_execution_time to 120 seconds, But still - its not enough. Either the time runs out or the memory. Do you have any idea how can I solve this problem? I thought about opening multiple sessions with fsockopen with timeout of one second to the script it self - but its complicated, so first - is there any better solution?