[SalesForce] Apex CPU Time limit exceeded while generating a page/PDF with a LOT of data

The system has the right to terminate any process that run longer than 10,000 ms in execution time, but it does not have the responsibility to do so. This means that during peak loads, your code might crash at 10,001 ms because the system needs to keep resources available for contending processes, but it might happily run to completion during the midnight hours or on weekends.

During non-peak times, you might be allowed to run 15k, 20k or more-- I've never seen an official absolute maximum, although I'm a bit surprised by the 24.7k, and the highest I've seen in production is about 15k. Unlike other governor limits, like DML rows or SOQL queries, the 10k ms limit is more of a suggestion than a hard stop. You are guaranteed a minimum time, 10k ms, so your code won't crash because it was at 9,999 ms. But it may or may not crash at 10,001 ms if the system needs the resources.

You shouldn't assume that just because you reached 24.7k that it would ever run in production. There's a slim chance that, at 2am, with no traffic at all, it might run to completion. It will also probably take far less time than 24.7k, because the system load will be lighter, and production hardware is beefier than sandboxes. I'd imagine that sandbox testing limits is probably close to double production, because the hardware is only half as powerful, and therefore might take twice as long to complete a transaction (confirmation or denial of this would be awesome).

In general, if you're going over 10,000 ms at all in Sandbox, you'll be running running the "close to limit" area in production (between 5k and 9k, most likely), at which point you should probably rightfully be concerned. At 15k in Sandbox, it's probably close to a 75% chance of sporadic failure in production, and anything after 20k in Sandbox should have 100% chance of failing sporadically in production. You need to optimize your code, or offload the heavy tasks to future methods, batches, etc.

I'm surprised you're hitting this with 1000 records, are you 100% sure there's no conditions caused by the larger data set (dupes or similar) that's causing an infinite loop in the code?

If there are no such bugs and you simply are hitting the limit then the first option would be to ensure the sending system sends a manageable amount of records each time, staying within a comfortable limit. If that's not possible then you'll need to restructure your solution on the Salesforce side, perhaps insert the information into holding records in a custom object, and then use a batch job to pick those up and turn them into proper accounts. If the accounts are basic but it's a lot of processing afterwards that needs to be done then maybe that's the bit to separate out, it'll depend entirely on what your code is doing.

To sum it up, there's no way to bypass this limit and you have to work within it, it's all part of being on a multi-tenancy system, but to take 10 seconds to process 1000 records definitely suggests that there's an infinite (or massively nested/recursive) loop going on somewhere.