What happens if you use a global hash. Would Apache::DBI cache the hash and allow multiple persisitant connections between different servers since the cached handle is bassed on the connect string.
i.e.

use strict;
use DBI;
use vars qw( %conn );

sub connect {
    reread_conf("./config");
    my $server = $config->{server};
    my $db     = $config->{db};
    $conn{$db} ||= DBI->connect("dbi:$server:$db", ...);
} 

my $dbh = connect();
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Where reread_conf has the config hash for that app. Would this work? I haven't tested it myself and would be interested to know.