$ENV{MOD_PERL} gives me "mod_perl/1.26", so I really really am running under mod_perl. I completely sympathize with your impulse to ask for this additional confirmation; it's behaving strangely and user error should be considered.

It has occurred to me that I haven't benchmarked Apache serving a similar-sized file. Now, the ab output breaks out transfer time, and the transfer time is a totally trivial part of the total. But it doesn't break out other overhead, like URI mapping and all that. Best I get myself a datapoint on that!

Okay, did that; just serving pages, Apache is using about .02 seconds. So that's not a significant part of the 2.6 seconds it's taking for my picpage to run.

My initial message on the topic, pointed to by the initial message in this thread, gave some profiling numbers showing that nothing except loading modules and reading the YAML config file took "any" time (and loading modules took 5 times more than loading YAML config).