Sporadic SSL connection trouble

Question

I happened to run across https://discussions.apple.com/message/5546820, which describes a problem very similar to one I've had troubles with since Mac OS X 10.5 Server and still happens with 10.6.7; I did not experience this with Tiger.
I have a web service written in PHP (v5.3.4) that makes another web service call to a third party web service.  The call TO my web service and the call my web service MAKES are both SSL encrypted; neither are going through a proxy.  Occasionally, my web service will get a SoapFault raised with the error "Could not connect to host" when instantiating a SoapClient object to connect to the third party web service.  We use this web service an average of nearly 1,000 times a day, and of those, only a handful each day gets this exception.  I have gone so far as to add code that will make a second attempt to instantiate the SoapClient class when the first fails.  Sometimes the second attempt works, but sometimes even it fails.
At one point I moved this process back to 10.4.11 Server (w/PHP v5.2.4), and experienced no errors.  I've also ran the same code on a Windows machine with PHP 5.3 installed and it did not experience the problem either.  So I don't believe it has anything to do with upgrading PHP from 5.2 to 5.3.  I have performed tests from other Macs connecting to one of Amazon's web services over HTTPS, and they too experienced random failures beginning with Leopard.  So I don't think it has anything to do with the specific machine on which the process is running.  I also tried consuming the Amazon web service over HTTP, and didn't experience the problem.
We have another process (on a different server running 10.5.8) that uses CURL to establish a SSL encrypted connection to a partner's system, and it's randomly failing on curl_exec() with "SSL read: error:00000000:lib(0):func(0):reason(0), errno 54".  According to http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html, error 54 means "Failed setting the selected SSL crypto engine as default!".
CURL details:
10.5.8 machine:
curl 7.16.4 (i386-apple-darwin9.0) libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict ldap http file https ftps
Features: GSS-Negotiate IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz
10.6.7 machine:
curl 7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8l zlib/1.2.3
Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict ldap http file https ftps
Features: GSS-Negotiate IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz
Neither error can be reproduced at will, but they do happen daily (no particular time of day; it's completely random).  It just really sounds like something is wrong with some low level code in the OS dealing with SSL that began with Leopard.  Anyone else having similar trouble?

Answer 1

i got the connection to work, and the problem was that the regional settings of the client was set to "Turkish". after changing it to EN, it worked.
(questions 2), 3) and 4) are "answered" herewith).
is there a workaround for the language problem ? (the reg. settings have to be Turkish)
(when set to "Turkish", the JRE parses the cacerts file erroneous (because of the Turkish 'i' character). running the program with "-javax.net.debug=all" parameter prints the trace)
now, i've another question :
when creating a user how do we specify which group the user belongs to ?
a solution for this is to find the group and add the user to the group. is there an attribute of the user which can be set directly at creation time ?
last question :
why does it take so long to get a context with ssl connection ? does anybody know how to make it faster ?
thanks