I'd like to echo everything the others have said and I noiticd you have the SSL module in there, that's going to throw you off as well. Its been my experience that different browsers have different speeds in rendering the secure pages, and all of them are slower than a direct perl grab like you have here.

Not a lot of good news in here eh? :-P

Personally I use the Apache program mentioned above. Its configurable, and it does a good "over all" job. If you need "browser effect" I'm still using a stop watch there. I'm really hoping some guru will stop by with a script method for you.

Glenn H.