It's not hard to run the sort of proxy setup that the page you read in the mod_perl guide recommends. However, the purpose of that is increasing scalability. Most sites don't need scalability because they hardly get any traffic. Don't fret about this kind of thing unless you expect your site to be relatively large in terms of numbers of concurrent users.

FWIW, mod_php has the same issue with process size if you run it with a code cache (sometimes called an accelerator). If you run it without one, it's slower than mod_perl.

No not necessarily, it really depends on what your concerns are. If, as it appears is the case, you are stuck with a mod_perl enabled Apache then you are going to have much the same size of httpd process anyway so you might as well use the mod_perl to handle the dynamic content, you can monitor the load on the server and tune the configuration (as I mentioned earlier) but if you have mod_perl already loaded then it will have no impact on the handling of static content whether you use it or not.

I'm beginning to think that you might be better asking these questions somewhere more specifically concerned with apache configuration issues.

/J\