In ssl.py of Python 2.6.1 we have this code in  SSLSocket.__init__():

            if do_handshake_on_connect:
                timeout = self.gettimeout()
                try:
                    self.settimeout(None)
                    self.do_handshake()
                finally:
                    self.settimeout(timeout)

The problem is, what happens if the remote end (server) is hanging when
do_handshake() is called?  The result is that the user-requested timeout
will be ignored, and the connection will hang until the TCP socket
timeout expires.

This is easily reproducable with this test code:


import urllib2
urllib2.urlopen("https://localhost:9000/", timeout=2.0)


and running netcat on port 9000, i.e.:

nc -l -p 9000 localhost

If you use "http" instead of "https", the timeout works as expected
(after 2 seconds in this case).