A common approach for increasing performance is just to use caching. In a way, generating static files is one form of caching, but there are others that you could consider, which might be easier than a rewrite of your application from dynamic pages to static pages:

• You can cache at the DBIx::Class level
• You can cache on the Catalyst level (probably requires more code changes, but gives you fine-grained control over what to cache).

• You can cache at the webserver level. For example with Apache, you can use a caching reverse proxy. If the caching rules for your site are easy, this might be the solution with the least code changes.

In any case you can invalidate the whole cache when there are big updates to your database.