While that would fix having to disable ssl verification, that shouldn’t change speed in any way. (Also, please don’t use ssl3, it’s dead and buried.)
@Korlian: Are you sure you’ve initially loaded the site? It might be that your app has some startup code related to the localhost webserver you’re using, which is the delay you’re seeing before receiving the response.
You might try running a local server like apache2 or wamp, which will create a local web server that your computer will keep up and running between requests, and use better memory pooling. (Both of those apps support php, javascript, etc by default)
You might check your server config for how long it keeps the pool initialized between requests, if it’s just you using it locally it’s safe to set that high so it never releases the connection.