Odd timeout behaviour

Hi - wonder if someone can help with an issue around plugin timeouts I’m having, running Nagios 3.4.3 on Suse. Everyday some of my ConSol Labs check_logfiles checks begin to timeout. They run every 4mins and normally complete in a few seconds at most. When they timeout this could continue for several hours, however … the strange behaviour is that if I carry out any of the following 3 things the check runs fine and the CRITICAL state goes to GREEN, or I can simply run the check without any kind of timeout - as mentioed this check should never take 10 secs to complete. In fact changing the timeout value to 45 secs makes absolutely no difference at all. Restarting Nagios makes no difference.

  1. In Nagios, “Re-schedule the next check of this service” - the check runs just fine.

  2. Run the check from the command line on the Nagios server - the check runs just fine.

  3. Run the check from the command line on the target server - the check runs just fine.

Has anyone come across this kind of behaviour before, or any ideas what might be wrong?

Thanks - Julian.