Perhaps use the Imager module since you can not use Image::Magick. It doesn't look like anyone else has recommended that yet.

Here is some sample code for resizing a JPEG with Imager.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Imager;
use strict;

my $file       = "something.jpg";
my $thumb_file = "something_thumb.jpg";

my $image = Imager->new()
   or die "Can't create Imager object";
$image->open(file => $file) or die $image->errstr;

# You could also pass qtype => 'preview' to scale() to
# supposedly make a smaller thumbnail (filesize wise)
my $thumbnail = $image->scale(ypixels => 100)
   or die $image->errstr;

# You could pass fd => fileno(STDOUT), instead of the file
# parameter if you need to print to STDOUT.  If you do so
# make sure to binmode STDOUT, and disable buffering ($|++)
$thumbnail->write(file => $thumb_file, type => 'jpeg')
   or die $thumbnail->errstr;
[download]

Also, as other people have said, if you need to generate the thumbnails on the fly, at least do some caching of them. Check if a thumbnail exists and perhaps even compare the timestamps of the thumbnail and the actual image so that you only have to generate the thumbnail when it is absolutely necessary.

When I was originally playing around with Imager I found it to be a bit slower than Image::Magick. Unfortunately I do not have any benchmarks... but it is something to keep in mind.

Hope that helps. Good luck with your application.