One possibility is that it has nothing to do with Perl but instead once in a while the connection to the server never gets established for whatever reason. Have you tried doing the same thing your script is doing with a program like wget to see if you have the same problem there? Connections not getting established can actually be somewhat normal depending on where the server is in relation to the client (i.e. are you going over an Internet connection or is it on a local network?). You can also try to capture a failed connection with Wireshark to get a better idea if this problem is at the network level.