I should have clarified this a bit better. The files reside in a directory beneath the www directory, and I think the overheads on loading CGI.pm is too great (?).
I wonder if throwing the HTML data into an SQL table and grab the info from there would speed things up. I mean; is this faster than accessing and printing a file? I doubt it, as this is what Perl fundamentally does best, but I really am not sure.