Comment 3 for bug 1450251

Launchpad isn't designed for bugs to have more than 1000 duplicates. It mostly works fine, but when you mark a bug with 1000 duplicates as a duplicate of another bug, it has to also switch all 1000 duplicates over to the new master bug. That's not a case that was designed for or tested at that scale, and not a case that has even come close to happening before, so it does not perform well in the uniquely pathological case of bug #1268257.

You can work around the timeout by moving all of the duplicates to the new master separately beforehand, eg. using launchpadlib (https://help.launchpad.net/API/launchpadlib).

If you have other timeout errors, you need to provide the OOPS ID that the error gave you. Saying that a timeout happens randomly doesn't give us any way to investigate the specific issue.