"Request Timed Out" deleting site collection

Today, I tried to delete a site collection from Central Administration and I got the "Request timed out" error! The site still showed up on the site collection list in CA but did not show any details (URL, Title, Primary Administrator, Database) and it was no longer giving me the option to delete it. I thought the site collection was not deleted cleanly and I tried to use the stsadm to delete the site collection: stsadm -o deletesite -url http://[sitecollectionurl]. This gave the following error: The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070003).

After some digging, I realized that the site collection had got deleted but the content database was still keeping a reference to it. To resolve the problem, I removed the content database and then reattached it to the web application. Removing and reattaching the content database can be done either in Central Administration or by using the stsadm utility.