Actually, I've never used WWW::Mechanize, so it didn't occur to me to try that. The routine I use for scraping the data from the Monk homenodes is given below. I think the main performance hit is the fact that I need to issue a separate request for each Monk. Ideally, it would be good to be able to grab all this information in a single go. But I'm not aware of any way that this is currently possible.

sub get_monk_stats {
    my $ref = shift;
    my $monk_url = 'http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=';

    my %monk_fields = (
        'User since:'   => 1,
        'Last here:'    => 1,
        'Experience:'   => 1,
        'Level:'        => 1,
        'Writeups:'     => 1,
    );

    MONK:
    foreach my $id (keys %{$ref}) {
        print "Getting data for $ref->{$id}{name} ($id)\n";
        my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
        my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET=>"$monk_url$id");
        my $result = $ua->request($req);
        next MONK if !$result->is_success;
        my $content = $result->content;

        my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$content);

        while (my $tag = $p->get_tag("td")) {
            my $text = $p->get_trimmed_text("/td");
            if ($monk_fields{$text}) {
                $p->get_tag("td");
                $ref->{$id}{$text} = $p->get_trimmed_text("/td");
            }
        }
    }
    return $ref;
}
[download]

Ideally, it would be good to be able to grab all this information in a single go. But I'm not aware of any way that this is currently possible.

You can work in parallel using POE::Component::Client::HTTP. Check it out.

--
David Serrano