As part of our application monitoring, we have scheduled jobs that run WWW::Mechanize scripts to check our web apps. They run fairly frequently, some every 10 minutes.

This past Sunday, one of our monitoring scripts sent email with a "500 SSL read timeout" error twice, a few hours apart. I tracked it down in the code and it appears WWW::Mechanize uses LWP which uses Crypt::SSLeay for https. Crypt::SSLeay has a module called Net::SSL and this is where the error came from. It appears to be a timeout on the read, and the node 500 SSL read timeout supports that.

Question: Can anyone speculate on what might cause this error? I just want to have an idea where to look if it crops up again. It has happened so infrequently (this is the first time I've seen it in several years), I'm hesitant to chalk it up as general internet slowness.

Some thoughts I had:

• the server was slow (but I have no reason to believe it was busy at these times on a Sunday);
• the SSL negotiation stalled or failed;
• the network was slow or was interrupted during the read;

We have a typical Apache/mod_perl configuration with a front proxy server and a back app server. SSL takes place on the front. We have Sun boxes with dedicated crypto-cards, if that makes a difference.

Thanks.

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