Thank you for the advise regarding alarm (I should've remembered that). Either I've implemented it incorrectly or the hanging HTTP request is also impacting the alarm because the request is still hanging and the alarm is NOT handling it as hoped. Here's the code with the alarm ..

  my $ua;
  my $url;
  my $msg;
  my $request;
  my $response;
  my $timeout = 50;

  $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
  $ua->agent("DMC-Monitor/1.0");

  $request = new HTTP::Request("GET", "$url");
  print "\$request=|$request|\n";

  $response = $ua->timeout($timeout);
  print "\$response=|$response|\n";

  $msg = "Alarm Timeout!!\n";
  eval {
          local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die("$msg"); };
          echo("alarm($timeout+2)\n");
          alarm($timeout+2); # Timeout + 2 seconds.
          $response = $ua->request($request); # <== Hangs here
          alarm 0;
          print "\$response=|$response|\n";
       };
  print "$msg\n$@\n" if ($@);
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Thank you again,