Which is, ironically, why I use FastCGI. mod_perl is too heavy for my needs (80% of my web requests don't require Perl in every HTTP process). I tried PersistentPerl/SpeedyCGI, liked it, but found a couple of bugs and the maintainer seems to have disappeared. I thought FastCGI was pretty much dead, then discovered that it's what Rails uses. Since it seems to be getting a new audience, I figured that I wouldn't be left in the lurch like I was with PersistentPerl.