What are possible causes that, when trying to edit within Confluence, it returns timeout error?

[Matthew Schandler]

We are able to access the site and navigate through the pages.  When trying to edit and entry, the operation times out and am left with a blank page.

Thank you.

[RianS]

The couple of items that come to mind are the following and under the assumption you are using the Confluence Server product:

The biggest one that I've come across is that the URL you are using to access the Confluence instance doesn't match the base URL setting. This can be as simple as the base URL setting using HTTPS and accessing the site using HTTP.

The newer versions of Confluence use a separate setup to handle the concurrent editing support called Synchrony. There might need to setup added to the server.xml file on the server if the Confluence instance is behind a proxy/load balancer. Here is document outlining troubleshooting for Synchrony.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You usually see other problems like broken default pages and macros when the base url is wrong.

The symptoms are however, exactly what you get from a non-functional Synchrony - everything works bar create and edit.

You can do a simple test here - go to Admin -> Collaborative editing. Turn off collaborative editing, then try a create again.  If it works, you know it's Synchrony failing.  Follow Rian's pointer for that!