Thanks. The remote file is never opened by the RemoteFile object and is read locally. Per your suggestion, and just to be safe, I commented that part out where the file gets downloaded and read and just used it to inspect the file properties (perms, whether it exists, etc.) and it still failed. Also, the number of runs it takes before it fails depends on how many other Net::OpenSSH objects already exist before it fails. So I'm pretty certain it has something to do with some kind of connection limit.