sporadically.

The cause of the sporadic time out was a leaking protection
against the global read lock, taken by the RENAME statement,
and not released in case of an error occurred during RENAME.
The leaking protection counter would lead to the value of
protect_against_global_read never dropping to 0.
Consequently FLUSH TABLES in all connections, including the
one that leaked the protection, could not proceed.
 
The fix is to ensure that all branchesin RENAME code properly
release GRL protection.