So here's what I did: to take out the internet access timing from the equation, I set up a local apache server on my windows box using indigoperl (indigostar.com), which sets up mod_perl by default (although I tried this with and without mod_perl).

I then combined my modules together in one big script and ran the above timing test against my local server, comparing the original script (with 13 modules) to the combined single script. The single script, btw, was 4,200 lines and 114kb).

The results: The single script average response time was 0.86 seconds, while the module-base script was 0.97 seconds. Strangely, mod_perl enabled didn't varied only about 1-2% from the non mod_perl response time.

So this is about a 10-15% increase in speed, which was more significant than I thought it would be, but still probably not worth the trouble, at least not right now...

alan