TeamCity REST API intermittently fails for JSON requests

Hello,

We have a python script to trigger build runs automatically based on some project name matching criteria.
It has been working for a month or so but has recently started to fail (approximately sometime last week).
The actual failure occurs when trying to get the url http://teamcity:8111/httpAuth/app/rest/projects/id:(PROJECTHERE)  in JSON format (by use of headers).
The failure is intermittent,  sometimes it succeeds, other times it fails.


Example stack traces from  script:

for all versions...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/bryan/bin/tc_releaser.py", line 105, in <module>
    main()
  File "/Users/bryan/bin/tc_releaser.py", line 101, in main
    tc_releaser(username, password, args.application, None, args.builds)
  File "/Users/bryan/bin/tc_releaser.py", line 68, in tc_releaser
    builds = retrieve_builds(None, application, all_builds)
  File "/Users/bryan/bin/tc_releaser.py", line 42, in retrieve_builds
    for project in get_json(TC_PROJ)['project']:
  File "/Users/bryan/bin/tc_releaser.py", line 25, in get_json
    return json.load(urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(a_url, None, {'Accept': 'application/json'})))
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 394, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 412, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 372, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1199, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1174, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 54] Connection reset by peer>


The function we use to build the JSON request and get its result is:

def get_json(a_url):
    return json.load(urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(a_url, None, {'Accept': 'application/json'})))

where for example:
a_url = "http://teamcity:8111/httpAuth/app/rest/projects/id:project712"


The teamcity-rest.log or any other log does not seem to mention anything relative.
Any idea what might be going wrong?


Thank you,
Nantia