not sure how much help this will be but i recently put up an Apache2 server (for Subversion) and wasn't sure if mod_perl (for Apache2) was quite ready for real world use. a bit of browsing later and i instead went with FastCGI.

use CGI::Fast qw( :standard );

while (my $q = new CGI::Fast) {
    process_request($q);
}
[download]

presto, script now way fast without mod_perl. there are some configuration directives that seem to imply that FastCGI can handle Auth stuff as well.