The timeout affects the send of a Message by the client to the Broker. In the case where a send is not async then the client waits for the Broker to return a response indicating that the Message was received and added to the Message store. In some cases this can block for a long time if the Broker has engaged producer flow control because one of its preset memory limits has been reached. If the client application can't tolerate a long wait on send it could configure this timeout so that MessageProducer::send doesn't indefinitely block.
Messages are sent in synchronous mode either because the Connection was configured with alwaysSyncSend=true or because the MessageProducer is sending with the delivery mode set to Persistent.
In general this setting shouldn't need to be used if you've configured your Broker with limits that match your use case.