How to correctly use SSL_read() in loop to fetch data which is larger than provided buffer size?

[rakeshcpp]

When I use ssl_read in loop, when there is no data left on the server it hangs for few min or infinitely and then returns -1 I am new to socket programming, and know I am missing something very basic, but I have tried a whole day for solution and found nothing similar.

Consider in the following code which will make the issue clear:

// Initialize SSL and create SSL context

SSL_library_init();
SSL_CTX *ctx = SSL_CTX_new(TLS_method());

// Create SSL connection
SSL *ssl = SSL_new(ctx);

// Set socket file descriptor
SSL_set_fd(ssl, sockfd);

// sending message to server
ssize_t sent_size = SSL_write(ssl, request, strlen(request));

// error checking code

// Perform SSL_read operations
while (1) 
{
    char buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
    int bytes_read = SSL_read(ssl, buffer, BUFFER_SIZE - 1);

    if (bytes_read > 0)
    {
        // no problem until we are here
        // Process received data

    }
    else if (bytes_read == 0)
    {
        // Here I got stuck, at some point I will always reach here, so does this really mean a connection closed or
        // there is no data left to read, and if there is no data left and I will continue to read it will return -1
        // which mean SSL error while I  was just trying to complete my loop

        // SSL connection closed by peer
        break;
    }
    else
    {
        // Handle SSL read error
    }
}

While there is data available there is no issue everything is going fine but as soon as data is complete, it goes hanging on SSL_read() operation it just waiting for few min to hour and then return -1. While I expect it will return 0 and I will simply break out of while loop.

I used timeout and thought of using non-blocking socket but that will just be hiding the original problem. Please tell what might be wrong regarding my SSL code. I have not set any specific option while creating SSL connection, just used default behavior.