I did this and am now seeing a big increase in speed!
By requesting a local HTTP request with mod_perl i was able to save 30 seconds for 500 LWP requests. I was also able to use $ENV{'MOD_PERL'} to verify my mod_perl install (mod_perl/1.23).
The test: i did a Simple get for a virtual domain on my server This was a local request, through apache. I requested this test page 500 times. One loop ran without mod_perl, the other with mod_perl.
Without mod_perl the test took=35.6595680713654 seconds
With mod_perl the test took=5.24513804912567 seconds
A few more runs confirmed my results.
Thanks PM world. Without this resource, mod_perl would have remained a mystery to me. Props to ajt for all the pointers.