I am looking to fetch web pages and inserting those in a database for further analysis. The current incarnation uses Perl, but I have performance concerns, particularly when the contents of the web page changes very often, because they contain market prices. Say during the most active hours of the day, the contents of a web page may change 5 times per second, whereas the Perl program takes about 2 seconds to fetch and store, so that is a full order of magnitude slower. Is there another language which comes to mind?

Criteria:
- web page fetching at a rate of a few times per second
- storing as SQL statements (possibly in batch only, for instance every 5 minutes, there is no real-time requirement here)
- ability to handle XML

Thank you in advance