I've done some work with HTTP requests, and I've had more success with IO::Socket::INET. This is a sub I use for various web client applications. It's consistently quick on UNIX and Windows.

I ran this script on both Linux and Windows using perl 5.8.8, and in both cases it took 2 seconds to download 14M. (time does not include writing it to a file)

  package HTTP::Request;
  
  use IO::Socket::INET;
  use warnings;
  use strict;
  use Carp;
  
  our $VERSION = '1.000';
  
  my ($content, $tags) = get_url( {
      webserver => 'www.example.com',
      url       => '/',
      port      => 80,
      verbose   => 0,  #Print the HTTP message sequence
      download  => 1,  #Mostly for crawler applications.  Content type
+s without
                       #links are not retrieved if set to 0.
  });
  
  if ($content) {
      print "Elapsed time: $tags->{elapsed}\n";
      print "Downloaded page:\n$content\n";
  }
  else {
      print "Content is not available\n";
  }
  
  sub get_url {
      my ($parameter) = @_;
      my $submit;
      my $port   = 80;
      my $content = '';
      my %tag;
      
      my $t1 = time;
  
      if (!exists ($parameter->{webserver})
              or !exists ($parameter->{url})) {
          croak "Missing webserver or URL information";
      }
      if (defined ($parameter->{port})) {
          $port = $parameter->{port};
      }
      my $webserver = $parameter->{webserver};
      my $url       = $parameter->{url};
      
      my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(
          PeerAddr => $webserver,
          PeerPort => $port,
          Proto    => 'tcp',
          Timeout  => 10
      );
      my $line;
      my $new_location;
      my @output  = ();
      my @headers = ();
      my $header;
  
      if ($sock) {
          $sock->autoflush();
          $submit = <<"END_GET";
  GET $url HTTP/1.0
  Host: $webserver
  User-Agent: HTTPR/1.1
  
  END_GET
  
          print $sock $submit;
          
          while ( $line = <$sock> ) { #separate loop to save processin
+g on body
              $line =~ s/\s+$//;
              if ( $line =~ /^\s*$/ ) {
                  last;
              }
              push @headers, $line;
              if ($line =~ /^Location: (.+)/) {
                  $new_location = $1;
              }
          }
  
          $tag{proto}   = $headers[0];
          $tag{elapsed} = time - $t1;
          $tag{url}     = $url;
          foreach my $stat (@headers[1 .. $#headers]) {
              $stat =~ /^(.+): (.*)$/;
              $tag{lc $1} = exists($tag{lc $1}) ? $tag{lc $1} . ', ' .
+ $2 : $2;
          }
          $headers[0] =~ /HTTP\/\d+\.\d+ (\d+)/m;
          my $http_status = $1;
          
          if ($http_status == 200 and
              ($tag{'content-type'} =~ /text|css|html/ or $parameter->
+{download}))
          {
              if (exists($tag{'content-length'})) {
                  #optimized reading if available
                  $sock->read($output[0], $tag{'content-length'});
              }
              else {
                  local $/;
                  while ( $line = <$sock> ) {
                      $line =~ s/\s+$//;
                      push @output, $line;
                  }
              }
          }
  
          if ($parameter->{verbose}) {
              print $submit . "\n";
              print join ("\n", @headers) . "\n";
              print "\n\n" . join ("\n ", @output);
              print "\n===============================================
+===\n";
          }
          if ($http_status == 301) {
              print "Page is relocated to $new_location\n";
              return;
          }
          elsif ($http_status != 200){
              print "ERROR webserver could not process request!\n"
                  . join ("\n ", @headers) . "\n";
              return;
          }
          else {
              $content = join ('', @output);
          }
      }
      else {
          print "Could not connect to $webserver port 80.\n";
          return;
      }
      return ($content, \%tag);
  }
[download]

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