Hi I have a web application which needs to be polled by a perl script. This perl script will be used as a plugin in Nagios so it has to perform as fast as possible.
The http request itself is just a simple http post.
My first choice would be LWP::UserAgent, but it appears to be quite slow. I compared the speed of LWP::UserAgent by letting my Perl script use /usr/bin/curl binary instead, which is to my suprize a lot faster.

Query using LWP::UserAgent 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use JSON;

my $client = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $json = new JSON;

my %request=('commandlet'=>'memory','output'=>'json');
my $json_request = $json->encode(\%request);

my $web_request = $client->post('http://localhost:12345/query',{ usern
+ame => 'default',
                                password => 'changeme',
                                json => $json_request
                                });
print $web_request->content;

[download]
Query using Curl: 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use JSON;
my $json = new JSON;
my %request=('commandlet'=>'memory','output'=>'json');

my $json_data=$json->encode(\%request);
my $command=sprintf"/usr/bin/curl -d username='%s' -d password='%s' --
+data-urlencode json='%s' http://localhost:12345/query 2>/dev/null|","
+default","changeme",$json_data; 

open FH,$command;
while (<FH>){
    print $_;
    }
close FH;

[download]
If I write a bash script which iterates 100 times over both scripts I get following results: 
Using curl:

real    0m4.006s
user    0m3.060s
sys    0m0.740s

Using LWP

real    0m12.978s
user    0m11.405s
sys    0m1.184s

[download]
I'm running Ubuntu 9.1 and LWP::UserAgent has version "5.829"
Has anyone an idea why LWP::UserAgent is so slow, or is this rather normal?
How could I speed up a simple post like this without the need to use the external binary curl all the time?
Thanks,
Jelle

In reply to Why is LWP::UserAgent so slow? by smetj

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