Hijk is a fast & minimal low-level HTTP client intended to be used where you control both the client and the server, e.g. for talking to some internal service from a frontend user-facing web application. It is NOT a general HTTP user agent, it doesn't support redirects, proxies, SSL and any number of other advanced HTTP features like (in roughly descending order of feature completeness) LWP::UserAgent, WWW::Curl, HTTP::Tiny, HTTP::Lite or Furl. This library is basically one step above manually talking HTTP over sockets. Having said that it's lightning fast and extensively used in production at Booking.com where it's used as the go-to transport layer for talking to internal services. It uses non-blocking sockets and correctly handles all combinations of connect/read timeouts and other issues you might encounter from various combinations of parts of your system going down or becoming otherwise unavailable.