timeout too long or unsupported ?

[Christophe Chisogne]

There are problems with timeout, apparently, at least with not 
responding webservers (dns timeout by example) :
I got timeouts of sometimes more than _5_min_ or more instead of 30secs
via $ua->timeout(30)! It's like the timeout setting does not exists.
Tested with LWP 5.69 (perl 5.8.0) and with LWP 5.43 (perl 5.005_03).
I also saw users that got 20min timeouts.

Is this a (very annoying) bug ? What can be done about it ?

Searching archives I found this:

From: Gisle Aas
Subject: Re: $ua->timeout info
Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 10:42:15 -0800
(...) timeout setting (...)
1) It is passed in as Timeout argument to IO::Socket::INET's
      constructor.  IO::Socket::INET currently only use this to
      fail the connect(2) call if it takes too long.  The DNS
      lookup of the hostname is done by IO::Socket::INET before
      it even considers the timeout.
Does this mean that, for a DNS timeout, any app using LWP will takes
much too long to exit ?
Looking rapidly to the CVS source, I saw that the timeout things seems
to be put in comment in IO::Socket::INET and IO::Socket !
What's going on ?
Could someone put me in the right direction ?

Here's a simple code to show the pblm. The 5 secs asked turned out
to be 21 secs. And no, I'm not behind a 33k modem ;-)
time test.pl:
real    0m21.901s
user    0m0.110s
sys     0m0.000s
------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use HTTP::Request;
use LWP::UserAgent;
$url= 'http://www.busca.net'; # or undefined dns domain
$ua= new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->timeout(5);
$request= new HTTP::Request('GET', $url);
$response= $ua->request($request);
# code 500 after a (too long) time
print "... Received code " . $response->code . "\n";
------------------------------------
Thanks in advance.

Christophe