Along with the other replies, if you don't want to have to recompile Apache/mod_perl, then you can also use XML::SAX::Simple in conjunction with XML::SAX::PurePerl, which will be slower, but won't segfault:

 use XML::SAX::Simple;
 local $XML::SAX::ParserPackage = "XML::SAX::PurePerl";
 my $hash = XMLin($xml);
 ...
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