Prefacing that this is vague hand wavy mode here, but maybe do something like this:

• Reverse proxy in front of all of this that routes between a pool of fat mod_perl authenticating servers and larger pool of dumb large file servers
• New requests that need authentication come in to the mp servers
• If a client is authorized you cook up a temporary download path somewhere the dumb server can handle and redirect the client there (with some sort of session key cookie returned to the client an stuck in a DBM file)
• The dumb file server uses mod_rewrite to check the request's cookie against the DBM file (changing to a 404 if it's not found, or serving the file if it is)
• A separate reaper process cleans out the DBM file periodically to age out old sessions (or possibly the file servers are still mp enabled and you have a Log handler do the cleanout)

That divides the "heavy" mp workers from the (potentially larger) pool of longer task workers. It also leaves you open to later migrate static file serving off onto separate boxen.

Update: Wording tweaks. Didn't read as well post caffeine . . .

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