Safari taking 3 hours between calls when site is down

[Matthew]

My team is using a Selenium Grid that contains a few Mac OSX slave nodes (Mac Minis, actually) to do Safari testing. When the site under test is down, selenium calls to the slave node running that test take consistently 3 hours to execute (and then don't return anything).

Does the selenium code just fail to properly handle calls to the Safari window when it contains a 404 (error message of "Safari can't find the server")?

I assume that the SO_TIMEOUT is being hit, since it is the only 3-hour timeout that I am aware of... but the session keeps going and doesn't report any problems back, so the test believes that everything is working normally.

This is with selenium 2.42.2 on the hub, slave node, and test code and Safari 7 on the slave: