Recently I moved a LimeSurvey instance from one server to another, unfortunately, upon doing this I was suddenly unable to login to the admin panel.
The login screen would appear, but upon trying to login, the browser just sat there with a spinning “thinking” wheel.

After sometime the following would appear on the screen:

Request Timeout
This request takes too long to process, it is timed out by the server. If it should not be timed out, please contact administrator of this web site to increase ‘Connection Timeout’.

I tried enabling Debugging mode, but nothing was logged.
After some googling, I found this thread followed by this thread

The solution
It turns out that Limesurvey is trying to ‘call’ home in the background to see if there is an update. For whatever reason, this request is failing.
To stop it from doing this, it’s possible to edit the config.php file (/application/config/config.php)
And under the section:

'config'=>array(
// debug: Set this to 1 if you are looking for errors. If you still get no errors after enabling this
// then please check your error-logs - either in your hosting provider admin panel or in some /logs directory
// on your webspace.
// LimeSurvey developers: Set this to 2 to additionally display STRICT PHP error messages and get full access to standard templates
'debug'=>0,
'debugsql'=>0, // Set this to 1 to enanble sql logging, only active when debug = 2
// Update default LimeSurvey config here
)


And add a line to the bottom there ‘updatable’ => false,:


'config'=>array(
// debug: Set this to 1 if you are looking for errors. If you still get no errors after enabling this
// then please check your error-logs - either in your hosting provider admin panel or in some /logs directory
// on your webspace.
// LimeSurvey developers: Set this to 2 to additionally display STRICT PHP error messages and get full access to standard templates
'debug'=>0,
'debugsql'=>0, // Set this to 1 to enanble sql logging, only active when debug = 2
// Update default LimeSurvey config here
'updatable' => false,
)


Success!
I use Installatron inside of Cpanel to manage updates, so I’m ok with disabling updates here.

Environment Info:
LimeSurvey: 2.72.3+171020
Cpanel with
PHP 7
Litespeed