One "easy" way would be to make the application asynchronous using Coro. Coro basically introduces what other languages call Green Threads to Perl. The drawback is that Coro does some dark magic to swap call stacks around, which may or may not play well with Apache, so you best put that functionality into a separate process. And even then it still employs that dark magic. See Twiggy and Starlet for Coro-based HTTP servers for example.