AxKit has made progress on the speed of XML processing. I think it uses a processor from Gnome now. You can also use Template Toolkit with the XML plugin or XML::Simple.

There's no way to share a coderef short of actually hacking some XS code, and even then it may not be possible. If it was easy, I assume that Storable would already do it. However, it sounds like you're saying that your data is hashes, not code refs. Those can be serialized. You could do a multi-level cache, with an in-memory version and a shared version serialized on disk. Take a look at MLDBM::Sync for an example, or HTML::Template.