Well.....After looking at, and trying your replies, Thank you very much for your help, It became clear that there was a random inconsistency in how things were running. I finally decided to run tcpdump and add a 'control' to the equation. suddenly everything worked just as it was supposed to. I did notice that tcpdump reported a packet dropped by the kernel though. I ran tcpdump a few more times and sometimes saw dropped packets and sometime not. I looked at the system resources in top and the system was never less than 50% idle, tcpdump was never more than 1% of cpu resources and I saw irq/18-b43 which while never over 4% cpu resources registered -51 for priority. I thought priorities ran from -20 - +20. I have no idea how to verify if the kernel is dropping packets when I am using your Sniffer::HTTP live but I am reasonably sure that is what my problem is.

I guess what all this means is that is not anything in my code. So the question now is, How to stop the packet loss. I found some information regarding disk writes blocking tcpdumps ability to retrieve packets from the nic before the buffer overflows and a suggestion to increase buffer size with 
echo 4194304 > /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max; echo 4194304 > /proc/sys/n
+et/core/rmem_default

[download]
It didn't seem to help, do you have any idea that might help with the kernel packet loss and or what I can do about it. I am running this on a couple different P4 machines one being a 3.2G the other a dual core 2.4G so I wouldn't think horsepower is the issue. Is there something that I should be doing differently on my system so that pcap works better?

Again, Thank you very much for helping me find the problem.

In reply to Re^4: Sniffer::HTTP problem with timeout by ponley
in thread Sniffer::HTTP problem with timeout by ponley

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