At work our internet connection is painfully slow for the moment while we sort something better out and I ran into a rather interesting quirk whilst using Composer and timeouts.
I was trying to install Laravel and because of the sheer number of components it got part of the way through and then would display some error message about exceeding the timeout limit of 300 seconds (5 minutes).
The reason for this appears to be due to the fact my Internet connection is mega slow and some components being largish in size. When calling composer update or composer install you just need to specify a higher timeout value.
This worked for me:
COMPOSERPROCESSTIMEOUT=4000 composer update
Obviously 4000 seconds will be enough time even for the slowest of Internet connections.
