Fantastic! I did some looking at this also. The problem is with deferred action on some signals and appears to be Perl version specific., eg Perl 5.8.2 will work differently than 5.8.0 and Perl 5.8.0 is different than Perl 5.6.x. The POSIX way >=Perl 5.8.2 is much better than the 5.6 way since you can do something other than just "blow up". There appears to be a way to "have your cake and eat it too" on more recent versions of Perl (apparently you can set the "safe" flag so that Perl checks ALRM often enough that the program won't hang). On the other hand, "blow up" is often the correct answer to something like "cannot connect to the DB".

Anyway programming is often pragmatic and you have do just do what works! If that means reverting to 5.6 style signal handling to cover all versions of Perl you work with, so be it!