I'll expand a little on my Win32 experience on what I did when I did static ilnkage of perl modules into main executable, which could help you some.
- rebuilt perl some needed XS modules statically, (this step could be skipped, actually)
- installed said perl into some dir for my edits (this could be just normal /opt/perlXXX setup for example)
- I cut out all of the Autoloader infrastructure
- use something like Module::Scandeps to get needed "pm" files *and* packed these into ZIP; or you can even ZIP all of perl module PMs
- some ~20 xxx.pm files are required to bootstrap Archive::ZIP to look into said ZIP archive, so I made in-memory hash of these files, yet I made it fast-to-load by some special technicque, yet I used Compress::Zlib to in-memory_compress it and placed into __DATA__ segment of my bootstrapper
- I hooked "CORE::require" so that they look into either said ZIP or into in-memory-hash
As a result, I had these 4 files:
- perl.exe + my larger perl58st.dll (with statically linked extensions, but normal perl.so will also suffice here)
- perllib.zip - to contain all pm files
- compr.pm - my mentioned hooker and bootstrapper
These 4 files contained entire setup with any said number of modules inside, except you should place module's shared library into the same dir, so it will be about 10 files more...
Given that static build isn't easy for you, all other steps could still apply and give you a speed win...
addition just thought, that my way gives you universal perl that is quicker-to-startup... If you need faster application run, you can avoid ZIP usage, and place all into in-memory-compressed content, so will be much simplier (yet smaller and faster), but less universal.
HTH,
vkon