Even more info:
I telnetted to the server, and ran a ping on the gateway while I wrote the
last e-mail. When I came back to the telnet screen, 129 packets had gone out
and 0 had come back (100% packet loss). So I tried again for 2 seconds and
it still didn't come back. Then I tried once more and it connected and began
pinging successfully (average time was 35 milliseconds) until I finally hit
Ctrl+C to break out of the ping.

So now we've establish that sometimes it just doesn't connect and sometimes
it does - seemingly random success and failure rates. All other sites can be
pinged perfectly.

- Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Stenberg [mailto:daniel_at_haxx.se]
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 1:37 AM
To: Curl Mailinglist
Subject: Re: Hangs every other transaction

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jonathan Hilgeman wrote:

> I use cURL + SSL to connect to a gateway and I send transactions to the
> gateway and receive info back for parsing. However, I've been having a
> lot of problems with cURL simply hanging. Finally, I reduced my tests
> down to a simple command line test:
>
> curl https://gateway.location.url
>
> And the first thing I get back is the appropriate error message from the
> gateway saying invalid configuration, which is what SHOULD happen. This
> happens within 1-2 seconds. Then, I hit the up arrow to repeat the exact
> same command, and it just hangs there until I hit CTRL+C to break out.
> This only happens with a certain gateway. All other https and http URLs
> seem to work fine. Any ideas anyone?

It certainly sounds as if that particular gateway is the one to blame for
this.

You could use curl -v to view the protocol interaction to see if that offers
any hints and you could try a network sniffer to see if there's any data at
all sent from the 'gateway'.

You could also consider talking to the admins of that gateway to get to know
if they can see anything odd in their log files or similar.

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- curl groks URLs -- http://curl.haxx.se/