Apache Web Server Timeout Settings

I've got an Apache web server in front of an Oracle reports server to
handle traffic. I'm opening a connection to the report server with a
timeout value of 5 minutes. Trouble is, some reports are taking
longer than 5 minutes to execute so the connection is timing out while
the repot is still exeucting. This results in the application seeing a
'failure' in report generation, but the report is actually generated.
The easy fix would be to just find out the maximum time needed to
execute a report and adjust the timeout above that threshhold, but my
concern would be leaving that connection open for over 30 minutes or
more. Has anyone encountered a similar siutation and if so, what fix
was put in place.