Sometime you might get crazy for the authentication timeout while working with phpMyAdmin. By default the timeout value is set to 1800 seconds which is 30 minutes.

You can easily increase this limit by editing your config file for phpMyAdmin. Simply open the config file (config.inc.php) and add following config variable with increased/decreased value.

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity'] = 36000; // In seconds 

Another thing, I hate to browse the records of a table by clicking next -> next -> and next. So, I changed the default listing from 30 to 100.
Add following config variable and your preferred number of records in browse mode.

$cfg['MaxRows'] = 100;

That's all. Hope this helps.