Is it possible to combine LWP::UserAgent with an alarm call to force a timeout? I've tried this but w/o success.

When alarm doesn't work (for whatever reason), I usually fork another process and have the parent kill the child (which would do the actual work) after a predefined time.

Something like this:

use LWP;

for (...) {
    my $pid = fork();  die "couldn't fork" unless defined $pid;
    unless ($pid) {
        my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
        
        my $response = $ua->get('http://...');
        ...
        
        exit;

    } else {
        select undef, undef, undef, 0.25;
        kill 15, $pid;
    }
}
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(you might want to use a more sophisticated timing/killing method...)