Hi Nikolaj,
Yes, that's significant. It causes the timeouts to be lowered, usually too far to make anything work... you need to ask your web hosting company to turn it off... PHP's safe mode was basically a bad idea, that they recommended people don't use. Eventually they deprecated it and removed it in the last-but-one version (http://php.net/manual/en/features.safe-mode.php). So it won't plague our lives again once everyone catches up to recent PHP versions...
And we need to make sure that is logged so that I can spot it earlier!
David