Perl mantra, do it first, if its too slow THEN look for a better solution.

That said, it will be easier and probably more efficient to look into something like mod_perl plus the built in connection caching of DBI. The two together can cause great speed improvments with virtualy no code changes. ;) Any solution that means running your perl script once and then having the webserver access it (like mod_perl does) will greatly help your speed since each hit doesn't have to wait for perl to start up. Just my 2 cents.