Employ caching, unless you already have, but it sounds like you haven't. With the amount of SELECT's that go around here on perlmonks, the only reason it does as well as it does is due to caching.

Seeing how most of the time, most of your stuff is static, a good caching mechanism will help a lot, but it would make sense to go the way of building static web pages, ala WebMake.

If yes - keep the parts that are truly static static, and only the parts that really need to be dynamic, dynamic. I mentioned WebMake above, and I suggest you look into it, if only for the idea of what can be done.

Another idea, although potentially complicated, is to mix the static and dynamic, via (i)Frame's and or (i)Layer's. Depending on your target audience, this can work out real well.

Having no idea of what you're doing mod_perl side, and having only dealt with Apache::Registry, I suggest you invest into a mod_perl book, if you haven't already, so you can beef up your mod_perl stuff, and employ a smart caching scheme.

As for what kind of caching scheme, I'm not really sure, not knowing anything about your database structure or said program, but you might wanna investigate DB_File (Building a Large-scale E-commerce Site with Apache and mod_perl) or Cache::Cache depending on your platform.

I have made available a win32 ppm of BerkleyDB/DB_File with one of the latest BerkleyDB's(4 something) available on my win32 ppm repository, in case you want something fancy ;)

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** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.