Thank you for the hint, but we had the default, which is 2 minutes.
For a quasi inhouse line, there should be no timeouts at all, but this problem is not Perl related ;-)
If it does not recover after 120s it will never come back.
And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!"
(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)