Copied activity remains associated with original project

Hi,

Issue is not about "connect timeout". 10 s for this is correct, as is it delay to get a connection to db.
Issue is about maintaining the connection. Defaut value in MySql is 8 hours (28800 seconds).
Your provider changed this value, and this is an issue for long treatments.
It forbids any "long time" process, such as batch treatments.
It is a choice of some "shared" hosting providers to avoid too hard load for single user, but may be an issue (as it is in this case).
No solution exists, unless changing provider.

NB : I agree that copy process is not really optimized; there is some work planned about this, not really easy as copy of projets is quite complex when you also copy assignments.