With the staleness check above, I was trying to NOT serialize the data, therefore storing a reference in a global shared among httpd processes. This wasn't working, obviously, and for good reason.

I agree that serializing is fast, except when you are trying to serialize too large a structure (we're talking foolishly large, here. My bad. Basically, I was serializing/deserializing a structure that was MUCH larger than it needed to be. I wouldn't think to do this with a DBI query, don't know why I was thinking it'd be OK when I did it with Storable.) I'm probably going to move toward splitting my structure into MUCH smaller chunks and still serializing it, or back to straight DBI. I haven't decided., this is going to depend on the results of some benchmarking I need to whip up, and the opportunity cost of switching my code.

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.