Webservice calls timing out more tha they should

Question

I am calling a REST webservice and set a read and connection timeout of 15,000 milliseconds. Probably 1 out of 3 calls is timing out although I dont think the length of the timeout needs to be increased because when it does work it returns the data in less than a second, and increasing the timeout to 60,000 ms doesn't improve the number of timeouts. When a query fails I retry it upto 5 times before eventually givving up, it always eventually manages to work within the 5 try limit, If I post the same query in a webbrowser it invariably returns correctly almost immediately. I have asked the provider of the webservice if their system is overloaded - they dont think so.
So Im now wondering if my code is incorrect, it receives a SocketTimeoutException when things go wrong. Is it correct for me to get the response code before I get the input stream, do I need to check that something is ready
before I access the inputstream. Here is an extract .
URL url = null;
BufferedInputStream bis = null;
HttpURLConnection uc = null;
try
    url = new URL(getBaseQueryUrl() + sb.toString());
    logger.config("URL:Encoded" + getBaseQueryUrl() + sb.toString());
    uc = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
    uc.setConnectTimeout(URL_TIMEOUT);
    uc.setReadTimeout(URL_TIMEOUT);
    int responseCode = uc.getResponseCode();
    if (responseCode == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_UNAVAILABLE)
        throw new ServerTemporarilyBusyException("Warning Musicbrainz Server Busy:" + uc.getResponseCode());
    if (responseCode != HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK)
        throw new InvalidMusicBrainzQueryException("Error:" + uc.getResponseCode());
    logger.finest("Receiving results from:" + getBaseQueryUrl() + URLDecoder.decode(sb.toString(), URL_ENCODING_CHARSET));
    bis = new BufferedInputStream(uc.getInputStream());
    JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance("com.jthink.jaikoz.manipulate.musicbrainz");
    Unmarshaller um = jc.createUnmarshaller();
    metadata = (Metadata) um.unmarshal(bis);
catch(SocketTimeoutException ste)
          System.out.println(ste);
    throw new NetworkException(Validation.getMsg(Validation.UNABLE_TO_CONNECT_TO_MUSICBRAINZ));
catch (IOException e)
    throw new NetworkException(Validation.getMsg(Validation.UNABLE_TO_CONNECT_TO_MUSICBRAINZ));
catch (JAXBException e)
          throw new InvalidMusicBrainzQueryException("URL:" + url.toString() + " failed");
}thanks Paul

Answer 1

FYI:The code was okay, the problem was due to my firewall, sometimes it wasnt letting responses from the webservice back. Dont know exactly why it was doing this not but chnaging the firewall has solved the issue.