I now believe that the reason it was done like that is the problem of sharing IO::Socket::SLL-instances.

The code is old, has not been maintained for years and the original developer has been gone for a long time...

Under normal circumstances it works (then you see SSL-connections being established fast) but when there is high load on the system both WMI-calls and the SSL-upgrade take a lot more time than usual.

I assume (not being an expert here) that the establishment of a SSL-connection is CPU-intensive as it entails a key-exchange and when you have another process that hogs the CPU this seems to take longer and unfortunately breaks all the implicit timing-assumptions of something that at the end of day is nothing more then one big hack...