Found an issue with open-uri because today Amazon’s API is wonky. The same issue will occur when accessing any remote data via open-uri (like a RSS feed) if the data source is going to slow. The relevant part of my ruby code looks like:

  begin
    doc = Nokogiri(open(api_url))
  rescue
    print "Connection failed: #{$!}\n"
    next
  end

For some reason, the rescue does not catch a timeout error.

/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:54:in `rbuf_fill': execution expired (Timeout::Error)

Explicitly catching the timeout error fixes the code.

  begin
    doc = Nokogiri(open(api_url))
  rescue Timeout::Error
    print "Timeout::Error: #{$!}\n"
    next
  rescue
    print "Connection failed: #{$!}\n"
    next
  end

Good to know, as you never know when your remote data provider will be slow.