LWP vs HTTP::Lite vs WWW::Curl

The winner is WWW::Curl. That was expected, now should you consider LWP convenience , only if you are ready to take the speed penalty . HTTP::Lite is not a bad choice ether.

    Rate  lwp lite curl
lwp   604/s   -- -52% -85%
lite 1259/s 108%   -- -68%
curl 3922/s 549% 211%   --

Here the full results and the very short test script

#:~/code/perl$ perl www_bench.pl 10000
Compare COUNT: 10000
Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of curl, lite, lwp...
     curl: 13.813 wallclock secs ( 1.21 usr +  1.32 sys =  2.53 CPU) @ 3952.57/s (n=10000)
     lite: 18.466 wallclock secs ( 5.62 usr +  1.69 sys =  7.31 CPU) @ 1367.99/s (n=10000)
      lwp: 27.366 wallclock secs (14.90 usr +  1.35 sys = 16.25 CPU) @ 615.38/s (n=10000)
      Rate  lwp lite curl
lwp   615/s   -- -55% -84%
lite 1368/s 122%   -- -65%
curl 3953/s 542% 189%   --

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
use strict;
use Benchmark qw(cmpthese disablecache timethese :hireswallclock);
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Lite;
use WWW::Curl::Easy;
our $cnt = $ARGV[0] || 100;
our $url = $ARGV[1] || 'http://127.0.0.1/';
our $body = 0;
disablecache;
print " Compare COUNT: $cnt\n";
my $r = timethese($cnt, { lite => sub { &lite; } , curl => sub { &curl; }, lwp => sub { &lwp; } } );
cmpthese $r;
sub lwp {
    my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
    $ua->timeout(10);
    $ua->env_proxy;
    my $response = $ua->get($url);
    if ($response->is_success) {
       print $response->content if ($body); # or whatever
    }else {
        print  $response->status_line;
    }
}
sub lite {
 my $http = new HTTP::Lite;
 my $req = $http->request($url);
 if ($req eq '200') {
     my $b = $http->body();
     print "********** LITE \n\n$b" if $body;
 }
}
sub curl {
   my $curl = new WWW::Curl::Easy;
   $curl->setopt(CURLOPT_HEADER,1);
   $curl->setopt(CURLOPT_URL,$url);
   my $response_body;
   open (my $fileb, ">", \$response_body);
   $curl->setopt(CURLOPT_WRITEDATA,$fileb);
   my $retcode = $curl->perform;
   if ($retcode == 0) {
       my $response_code = $curl->getinfo(CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
       # judge result and next action based on $response_code
       print("************ CURL \\n\n $response_body\n") if $body;
   } else {
       print("An error happened: ".$curl->strerror($retcode)." ($retcode)\n");
   }
}