I use Apache and mod_perl for the server side apps. I wouldn't use HTTP::Daemon on the server side, because it is slow and doesn't have the administration features that I really need.

One of our apps needed a little web server on the desktop, so for that we used HTTP::Daemon. This allows us to deploy a simple, more portable configuration to a large number of users. It's multiplatform, also.

The biggest difficulty with Apache is the learning curve for doing complicated things. Apache tries to make simple things simple. Like just about everything else, it's not quite as good as perl in this regard.

Apache has a modular architecture and can be built for low resource usage. 750K for an httpd process is not unusual. For CPU usage apache should be much lower.