LWP::UserAgent hangs on SSL connections with keep-alive enabled

[Michael Spratte]

When using LWP::UserAgent on SSL connections with keep-alive enabled the connection will hang or terminate with an error. This bug was introduced between 10.04 and 12.04.

The attached program ssl-keep-alive.pl run on 12.04 demonstrates the problem. An example run with keep-alive disabled produces the following output (where the first argument is the URL and the second is 0 to disable keep-alive or 1 to enable it):

$ ./ssl-keep-alive.pl https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnet-http-perl/+bug/1057609 0
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 2 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 4 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 5 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 6 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 8 seconds)
$

Enabling keep-alive produces differing output:

$ ./ssl-keep-alive.pl https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnet-http-perl/+bug/1057609 1
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 2 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 2 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 3 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 3 seconds)
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 3 seconds)
$ ./ssl-keep-alive.pl https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnet-http-perl/+bug/1057609 1
starting GET ... done (elapsed time so far: 17 seconds)
starting GET ...
500 Server closed connection without sending any data back
$

Using the latest Net::HTTP::Method module (version 6.06) fixes the problem. See https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=81237 for details of this bug. Upgrading package libnet-http-perl to the latest upstream version 6.06 not only will fix this problem but also address bug 1057609 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libnet-http-perl/+bug/1057609).

[Florian Schlichting (fschlich)]

The fix has landed in Ubuntu, thus closing this bug now