The configtimeout setting mashed the connect and read timeouts together, which could cause erroneous timeouts if everything was working fine but Puppet was transferring a very large file.
It has been replaced by two new settings:
http_connect_timeout — controls how long Puppet should attempt to make a connection. A short timeout for this is sensible, since an over-long connect time usually means something’s wrong.
http_read_timeout — controls how long Puppet should allow transfers to continue. It’s normal to let this last a long time or be infinite, since some things just take a while to compile or download.
The old configtimeout setting now logs a deprecation warning if it’s set, and will be removed in Puppet 5.0.