I have a program that uses urllib to periodically fetch a url, and I see intermittent errors like :

I/O error(socket error): [Errno 111] Connection refused.

It works 90% of the time, but the othe r10% it fails. If retry the fetch immediately after it fails, it succeeds. I'm unable to figure out why this is so. I tried to see if any ports are available, and they are. Any debugging ideas?

For additional info, the stack trace is:

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib.py", line 235, in retrieve

fp = self.open(url, data)

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib.py", line 203, in open

return getattr(self, name)(url)

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib.py", line 342, in open_http

h.endheaders()

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 868, in endheaders

self._send_output()

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 740, in _send_output

self.send(msg)

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 699, in send

self.connect()

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 683, in connect

self.timeout)

File "/usr/lib/python2.6/socket.py", line 512, in create_connection

raise error, msg

Edit - A google search isn't very helpful, what I got out of it is that the server I'm fetching from sometimes refuses connections, how can I verify its not a bug in my code and this is indeed the case?