I've seen the advice n times (where n > 3) to use the LWP libs instead of Net::Telnet. The problem is, http://mydomain.com does not specify which http daemon actually serves the page. It looks like IO::Socket::INET is the next best bet, this module lets one specify hostnames. Anyway, here's a working version of the originally posted code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw( time tv_interval );
use Net::Telnet ();
 
$0 = 'ruffbench';
 
unless (@ARGV){
  die "Usage: $0 <host> [<host2> <host3> ...]\n";
}
 
my $port = '80';
my $t    = new Net::Telnet;
my $get  = "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n";
my %time;
 
foreach my $host (@ARGV) {
 
  print "$0: Connecting to $host. Starting timer.\n";
 
  my $start = [ time() ];
  $t->open(Host=>$host, Port=>$port);
  print "$0: Connected to $host. Sending request...\n";
  $t->print($get);
  print $t->waitfor(String=>"Content-Type", Timeout=>5 );
  my $end = [ time() ];
  $t->close;
 
  print "\n$0: Connection closed. Timer stopped.\n\n";
 
  $time{$host} = tv_interval($start, $end);
}
 
print "$0: Summary of results:\n";
foreach my $host (@ARGV) {
  printf "%9s: %10s ... %2.2f seconds\n", $0, $host, $time{$host};
}
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