Thanks for pointers. It seems related the way libcurl handles signal handlers within. I have played around by setting: CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL used to disable the timeouts while the name resolve takes place.

$http->setopt(CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL, 1);

while (1) {

    my stuff here ...

    ### Interval
    pause;
}
[download]

http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL.html This might not be smart if I really need to timeout, I think in for some reasons DNS calls are not functioning. I need to think.