be suspicious about Template::Toolkit too. Because it gives you the option of flow control in your templates, I wonder you are getting the full advantages of pre-compiled code that mod_perl should give.

Try CGI::FastTemplate instead - it's substitutions are pure regex subs, not as powerful, but plenty good enough for many purposes (you have to shift the flow control logic, if you are using it, somewhere into your application where it will get pre-compiled).

I think that if you are really using mod_perl to full advantage, you will be in a much better situation.

One problem you have is : are you comparing like with like? You have so many modules in there, if you really want to do a language comparison for raw speed, you should start with a very simple, raw perl app that connects to the db, and it's equivalent in java, compare them, then add layers onto each. Otherwise it is impossible to know what you are measuring.