the has been a report about an upgrade going awry based on timeouts as initially reported in MDL-26580 at
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-26580?focusedCommentId=106462&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-106462
(near 'file_storage.php')

The approach in that bug was to help alleviate upgrading timeout pains however the solution was partially integrated leaving out the timeout estimation for scrom/locallib.php:create_file_from_url() -> donwload_file_content().

This bug is about a improving the suggested fix in MDL-26580.

SamH and Eloy have discussed and suggested that its better to have timeouts as an option, something like:

/lib/filestorage/file_storage.php:694:
public function create_file_from_url($file_record, $url, array $options = NULL, $usetempfile = false, $usetimeout = false)

./mod/scorm/locallib.php:189:
if ($packagefile = $fs->create_file_from_url($file_record, $scorm->reference, true)) {

./lib/filelib.php:923:
function download_file_content($url, $headers=null, $postdata=null, $fullresponse=false, $timeout=300, $connecttimeout=20, $skipcertverify=false, $tofile=NULL, $calctimeout= false) {

followed by some similar timeout code : https://github.com/nebgor/moodle/commit/2a083e9774dbd6b7d258d346fa319a918645e05b