diff --git a/doc/man/man5/slurm.conf.5 b/doc/man/man5/slurm.conf.5
index aa2cd795b95c55e05c8ced0d6ccd42fbd3034c38..0feb19c286812257f184882ff15f75bb85b6d43b 100644
--- a/doc/man/man5/slurm.conf.5
+++ b/doc/man/man5/slurm.conf.5
@@ -980,13 +980,15 @@ different shared memory region and lose track of any running jobs.
 \fBSlurmdTimeout\fR
 The interval, in seconds, that the SLURM controller waits for \fBslurmd\fR 
 to respond before configuring that node's state to DOWN. 
-The default value is 300 seconds.
 A value of zero indicates the node will not be tested by \fBslurmctld\fR to 
 confirm the state of \fBslurmd\fR, the node will not be automatically set to 
 a DOWN state indicating a non\-responsive \fBslurmd\fR, and some other tool 
 will take responsibility for monitoring the state of each compute node 
 and its \fBslurmd\fR daemon.
-The value may not exceed 65533.
+SLURM's hiearchical communication mechanism is used to ping the \fBslurmd\fR
+daemons in order to minimize system noise and overhead.
+The default value is 300 seconds.
+The value may not exceed 65533 seconds.
 
 .TP
 \fBSrunEpilog\fR