When your website is integrated with Real-time protection on Active mode, the ShieldSquare engine will respond to every request with a response code. The API timeout value is the waiting time for receiving the response from the ShieldSquare engine. By default the timeout value will be 100 ms. If the network latency between your server and ShieldSquare server is more than 100 ms, please contact support (raise a request) and we will check what best can be done.
However, when your website in integrated in Monitor mode, the website load time is not affected by the response time. The parameters needed for bot detection are asynchronously forwarded to the ShieldSquare server, for bot detection. This thread waits for a response (not to load the page), just to close the loop of receiving response.
If ShieldSquare API is down (has not happened so far), it will make the thread to wait for the response and in turn this might increase the load on the server CPU. Thus we set the timeout to 1000 ms even for monitor mode, that even during unlikely event, thread (of waiting for response) will be terminated after 1000 ms and does not wait for the response.