Yes, timeouts happen. But five times in a row, at two different times a day, and only on the same days, seems like a very specific problem that shouldn't yet be discarded as "timeouts happen."

I've had that happen, connection reset from DSL provider, takes a minute or so to restablish DSL connection, then it works ... problem likely has nothing to do with server code or client code, its just internets

then go with something like LWP. But Mechanize is very over-featured for the task and we don't clearly know yet if it's Mechanize or the socket.

Mechanize is just very very thin layer on top of LWP

The point of going lower level is to eliminate possibilities of what's causing the problem...

Sure, I can agree with that :) but there is no need to write more code, just turn on debugging

Re^5: HTTP error response code 500 using LWP::UserAgent on one site, but not on any other says

use IO::Socket::SSL qw(debug3);

Also, http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/Crypt::SSLeay#SSL_diagnostics_and_Debugging lists $ENV{HTTPS_DEBUG} = 1;