HTTP::MHTTP - this library provides reasonably low level access to the
HTTP protocol, for perl.  This does not replace LWP (what possibly could
:-) but is a cut for speed.  It also supports all of HTTP 1.0, so you
have GET, POST, PUT, HEAD, and DELETE.  Some support of HTTP 1.1 is
available - specifically Transfer-Encoding = chunked and the Keep-Alive
extensions.

Additionally - rudimentary SSL support compiled in.  This effectively
enables negotiation of TLS, but does not validate the certificates.

A way faster http access library that uses C extension based on mhttp to
do the calls.

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/HTTP-MHTTP/