The maximum time Jenkins will wait for an EC2 instance to become active before trying to request a new instance from the fleet.

By default, Jenkins expects that a node will be available immediately. However, EC2 instances require some time to be provisioned, start, and be ready for builds. Therefore, Jenkins might request more capacity than is actually required (over-provision). This setting prevents over-provisioning by forcing Jenkins to wait until an EC2 instance is online before requesting more capacity.

Cannot be negative. For positive values, force Jenkins to wait up to the given value for an instance to come online. If set to 0, the timeout will be disabled and Jenkins will not wait any time to start up EC2 instance, which could lead to over-provisioning.

Note: Be careful with exceedingly large values (more than 5 min) for this setting. If any problem prevents the node from coming online (no Java, wrong version of Java, Jenkins agent cannot start, etc.), Jenkins will wait without requesting additional capacity.

Behavior of versions of plugin before 1.8.0 could be represented as this version with timeout set to 0.