If installing mod_perl is an option for you, I heartily second Aristotle's comments regarding Apache::Registry. I've seen awesome performance gains when running vanilla CGI scripts with Apache::Registry. You'll have to make sure your CGI scripts are pretty strictly coded however so there may be some "tweaking" required to get them to run under Apache::Registry. You might want to check out cgi to mod_perl Porting on perl.apache.org.

-- vek --