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I am starting to find this really annoying, and a few other people have mentioned it too. Login timeout seem to happen too fast, way too fast sometimes. Sometimes I'll be making a fairly quick edit to an article, such as adding a paragraph, which only takes a few minutes. When I go to save my changes, I get told I've been logged out, which often means I've lost my work. Can we change the timeout so it is longer, say 1 hour?
I think the root cause of this mess is the session handling by MediaWiki. An upgrade of the core will have one patch to the system [1] that helps with timeouts when using a cache. This however may or may not help the actual session issues themselves, that will only be known once the upgrade occurs. [1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/18069/1 (WARNING: This is all only to the best of my knowledge and I could be completely wrong.)
I also think this is extremely annoying. FWIW, whenever this has happened (it manifests for me as a "Due to loss of session data, your edits weren't saved" or something similar) hitting the submit button again on the page almost always fixes it. That is to say, I've never lost work from this bug, but only been annoyed.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 19390 ***