Differing results in calling same program from different environments

I have an ILE RPG program is pretty simple: It checks to see if the port at a certain host is online or not. It was written to demonstrate how to call an RPG program from Java. It works fine when called from Java. I wrote an ILE RPG 5250 program that calls the same program (CHK_PORT). It works well in that ILE RPG program as well. So I am now using it in a CGIDEV2 program and it works well if the host/port is online but if the host is offline, the call times out rather than returns which causes the CGIDEV2 program to fail.

The CHK_PORT program is based on some code from Scott Klements Sockets programming tutorial (I think). The challenge in writing the program in the first place was coding for the the failure of the connection when the host or port was offline. I solved it using the following code:

C*************************************************
C* Connect to the requested host
C*************************************************
C/FREE
init_signals();

alarm(5);
if connect(sock: p_connto: addrlen) < 0;
msg = 'unable to connect to server!';
// dsply msg;
callp close(sock);
alarm(0);
port_status = '0';
return;
else;
msg = 'Host is online!';
port_status = '1';
// dsply msg;
endif;
/end-free

Again, the code works great when I call it from Java or from the ILE RPG 5250 program I wrote, but the CGIDEV2 program which calls the program never seems to time out when the connection fails. This *seems* like an activation group issue (?) but I can't quite figure out why an offline host/port causes it to fail ONLY in the CGIDEV2 program call. In fact, the code used in the CGIDEV2 program was a cut and paste from the 5250 program with slight modifications to accommodate the CGIDEV2 methods of reading/writing to the output.

Any ideas on where to start tracking down the issue?