Steps to reproduce the issue / Analysis

It's a bug hard to reproduce because it is hardware-related.

I quickly mention this bug in #28312 (even if it's not the main subject of this one).

It happens on the installer final step (cf screenshot below): the installation just fails.

On medium speed HDD: the installer successfully ends

~582 queries were executed.
Mysql queries log:

| 2020-03-13 14:25:54.736576 | joomla[joomla] @  [anonymized] |         6 |         0 | Init DB      | joomla
| 2020-03-13 14:26:19.289498 | joomla[joomla] @  [anonymized] |         6 |         0 | Query        | CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `jojm5_action_logs_users` (
  `user_id` int(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  `notify` tinyint(1) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  `extensions` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`user_id`),
  KEY `idx_notify` (`notify`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 DEFAULT COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci
| 2020-03-13 14:26:30.148381 | joomla[joomla] @  [anonymised] |         6 |         0 | Quit         |

First and third queries correspond to what I suppose to be the first and last queries of the installDB task.
The second query is the one that corresponds to the last query of the failed install. It is executed at roughly the 2/3 of the duration between initDB and Quit.

On slow HDD: the installation failed

The initDB and the last executed queries are shown. ~110 queries were executed.
Mysql queries log:

| 2020-03-13 14:51:47.288283 | joomla[joomla] @  [anonymized] |         5 |         0 | Init DB      | joomla
| 2020-03-13 14:52:55.106886 | joomla[joomla] @  [anonymized] |         6 |         0 | Query        | CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `rr30u_action_logs_users` (
  `user_id` int(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  `notify` tinyint(1) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  `extensions` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`user_id`),
  KEY `idx_notify` (`notify`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 DEFAULT COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci

It appears that roughly 2/3 of the needed time to execute all the install queries was disposed in nearly a minute.

On the slow HDD case, the time overhead causes the request to timeout on apache default configuration (timeout=60s).
There was an hint on the developer tool of the install page (in the blue square):

System information (as much as possible)

• I use the joomla docker image (https://github.com/joomla/docker-joomla).
• I have an Apache reverse proxy ahead of my docker containers
• I use on the same machine several HDDs with various performances (but any slow HDD should face this issue, I just have the opportunity to use a quicker one)

Additional comments

2 temporary solutions I found to bypass this issue:

• set a higher request timeout in my apache reverse proxy configuration (the one ahead of my docker container).
• change location of the Joomla install and MySQL DB to use a quicker disk (there should be no issue with a mid-end 3.5" HDD as mine, or even better a SSD).

However solutions can be put in Joomla's code to mitigate the issue or remove it:
1/ tell the user during the installer that a timeout on a task happened, and how to verify if it's related to their computer performances (as in my case) or not
2/ split this "huge" request in smaller ones to allow slows disks to execute it/them successfully - but yes I'm aware this will need some dev time to achieve this.

This can be related: joomla/docker-joomla#54