Padma,
Two other suggestions to try. First is to work with the Basis team to troubleshoot why that method is taking so long to execute on the backend. It may be that you need an additional index or something to help speed that up. Second, in the Management Cockpit under your application App Specific Settings and the Server section there is an Inactive Timeout which is defaulted to 600 seconds. You can try increasing this number so that the backend has more time to complete the execution and see if that helps as well.
Even if the second option solves the immediate issue I would still recommend pursuing the first one.
--Bill