I'd go for the second solution as there are some glitches with sharing data inside Apache.
For performance Apache uses more than one process (configurable via (Min|Max)SpareServers),
these cannot easily share data.

On the otherhand with HTTP::Daemon one can create a simple
HTTP/1.1 (not all of HTTP/1.1 of course) webserver in less than 20 lines of code :)
merlyn wrote some Http proxy servers with it.
Or have a look at POE.