You are aware that this time is out of your control and is the time it takes for your network connection to the remote end and for the server there to respond?

If you have only this one request, there is no way to make it twice as fast, except buying a faster network connection and buying the remote end better hardware.

If you have multiple URLs to fetch, you can launch multiple requests in parallel. See Parallel::ForkManager or maybe AnyEvent::HTTP or Future.