It's past midnight, so my mental capacity is going to rapidly approach that of a pumpkin, so take this all with a sprinkle of salt.

The answer to question 4 (are you making it too complicated?), is probably yes. Grab your HTML::Template man-page, and do a search for "file_cache". Here's one I prepared earlier: 

file_cache - if set to 1 the module will store its
cache in a file using the Storable module.  It uses no
additional memory, and my simplistic testing shows
that it yields a 50% performance advantage.  Like
shared_cache, it will work in a CGI environment.
Default is 0.

[download]
Now isn't that neat? HTML::Template already knows about the Storable module, and the comments underneath make note about it using flock() to make sure everything behaves. (Regular caveat about file-locking being broken on NFS applies.)

Hope that you find the above useful.

Cheers,
Paul

In reply to Re: mySQL hits or Storable retrieves? by pjf
in thread mySQL hits or Storable retrieves? by Hero Zzyzzx

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