It will typically have better performance

True, mod_perl is pretty hard to beat if it meets your needs. I was just illustrating that there was, as they say, more than one way of doing it :-)

That said, I've been surprised at how well POE performs.

A few months back I needed a server to talk to some legacy applications as part of a web app. mod_perl wasn't really suitable (the legacy app wasn't HTTP based, had a stateful protocol, stupidly long connection times, stupidly small number of allowed connections) so I threw it together with POE.

I was fully expecting to have to rewrite in C once I had the prototype up and running. However, straight POE was more than fast enough. One more reason to like Perl :-)