There are likely many different things you might do to speed up your server, but some will definitely be more effective than others, so it would be well worth your while to spend some time figuring out where your bottleneck actually is. While mod_perl will indeed save you a lot of startup time, if for instance your scripts are doing large database queries or computationally intensive tasks, is startup time an issue? Your problem could be any number of things from a lack of memory to a fundamental design flaw, but if you don't know, you may end up doing a lot of work for little or no gain.

For a recent example, while I don't know what your level of Perl expertise is, it may be that some simple code and/or algorithm modifications could be very beneficial. As an example, in this case a very simple modification produced a factor of 40 speed improvement.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser