Hello Anonymous Monk,

Have a look on this previously similar answered question Hard timeout for LWP::UserAgent or similar, as it contains several different approaches to your problem.

Update: I just wrote a very small sample of code that it looks like timeout is working. I do not know why it is not working for you.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent ();
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->timeout(1);
my $uri = "http://192.168.1.31/noexist.html";
print time . "\n";
my $response = $ua->post($uri);
print time . "\n";

if ($response->is_success) {
    print $response->decoded_content;  # or whatever
}
else {
    die $response->status_line;
}

__END__

$ perl test.pl
1534257027.70495
1534257028.72877
500 Can't connect to 192.168.1.31:80 (Connection timed out) at test.pl
+ line 18.
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Hope this helps, BR.

Further investigation shows that timeout works for http but not for https

Does this throw any further light on it?

Counter-example as SSCCE:

use strict;
use warnings;

use LWP::UserAgent;
use Test::More tests => 1;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new ();
$ua->timeout (5);
my $start = time;
my $res = $ua->get ('https://www.sco.com:666/');
my $duration = time - $start;
cmp_ok ($duration, '<', 10, 'Short timeout triggered');
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