mod_perl does not offer connection "pooling" exactly. It simply keeps connections persistent. You can do something similar in FastCGI by putting your database connections into a global and leaving them open, or using the connect_cached method of DBI.

If you've set the threads to 1, you'll have problems no matter what kind of page you're fetching. If you haven't, the socket stuff will give you trouble.

If you really want to use mod_perl, I strongly suggest you look at how to get rid of this need for LWP requests. It's going to be a performance killer, and you can probably do it with a subrequest or something.