Although I agree that it may not be a complete solution, LWP can often be used as a quick sanity check on a site.

For a more robust version, I guess you could add calls to Net::Ping to get some idea of network latency and such.

I actually used this as a test on some production servers. The important part was not the actual time value, but the difference from a baseline. In our case, a factor of two was not important, but a factor of ten was critical.

G. Wade