Read the Docs timeout issue

[d-chambers]

RTD keeps timing out when nbsphinx is building the documentation. When I run the docker image installing the anaconda env takes ~20 minutes so I suspect this is the problem but the log is less than useful.

[calum-chamberlain]

Have you considered using pip to set up your RTD env? I think RTD caches pip packages, and not conda ones - so it might time out again the first time, but not after that.
Looks like conda env create takes about 9 minutes on RTD.

[d-chambers]

Good idea. I think there was a hangup with pytables when I first tried it, but it is worth looking into again.