Frankly, modules are excessively slow to load.

Not true if your operating system is not Windows. Only POE loads slowly, but POE programs are long-running anyway.

Time how long it takes to load DB

0.1 seconds on my machine, including loading perl itself (perl -MDBI -eundef).

mod_perl is a "hack" solution and I'd prefer not to go down that road.

PHP is much more of a "hack solution", and compared to PHP, mod_perl is a very very powerful and clean implementation of Perl in Apache. Just that it's a normal language embedded into Apache doesn't make it bad.

What I'd like is a way, as a user, to create a perl binary that has the necessary modules pre-loaded.

Or use a longer term Perl interpreter, like mod_perl itself or PPerl. Why would you prefer non-modularity? Don't like use?

but again I'd like to be able to do it as a non-compiling user.

If you can't compile, learn how to do so.

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