Reading through the code, I think that we need to make this default timeout much higher. Every time we do a sync we block any precommit methods for the length of the synchronization. Given that we expect synchronization to be a no-op (it is only required when neutron or EOS reboots), doing it often does not seem worth it.

I would set the default to 5 minutes.

If we change the synchronization to be lower weight (ie don't pull the full OpenStack configuration each time), we can lower the timeout.