What makes me curious is the difference you see when you stop using CGI.pm. I realize this won't translate to the full-blown handler version of the script, but did you try loading CGI.pm via default in mod_perl, or did you have

use CGI;
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"He's got about as much personality as a loaf of bread" -- Wally Pleasant, She's in love with a Geek

Yeah, I would be interested in this too. Is CGI.pm being used from within a test script, or from startup.pl/httpd.conf? You could also try only importing things like use CGI qw/:standard/. I believe CGI.pm has some magic code inside to help with memory when you do so, although I haven't perused the source in quite some time now. Either way, if CGI.pm is being preloaded I wouldn't think you would see as much of a hit, since it stays resident in memory and isn't loaded each time the script is called.

Cheers,
KM

No, I didn't preload CGI.pm, I just said "use CGI qw(:standard);".

I did this because I wanted to measure the performance of a CGI script that's handed over to Apache::Registry.