Downloading emails with attachments?

Question

PHP

I collect mail from mailboxes in php via imap and store them in the database.
Faced such a problem that it all works rather slowly, one letter is loaded from 5 to 20 seconds.
There are solutions to implement this faster, maybe in other programming languages. I work under CentosOS 6.5 and how to check for new emails so that the database always has up-to-date information.