mod_perl was always a pain to compile and work with on your own; in my experience, going back to 2000 or so; caveat to my opinion: I am sys-challenged. It was a smart and powerful tool but was always hard-wired to apache which back in the day was a reasonable choice but ultimately a bad design that kept it out of the shared hosting game. Sidenote: it was part of why Toys.com fell apart during its first Christmas rush, and why PHP took the web from Perl.

People recommend FastCGI because it’s the only decent option for Perl in many setups and shared hosting. I do not recommend it, mod_perl, or apache today. For Perl some sort of dedicated, agnostic, application server. I use uwsgi where I control the server, and nginx as the webserver. It speaks PSGI fine if launched and configured for it. There are other options but I do not know most of them well enough to discuss or recommend them except to say that, currently, uwsgi is superior to all the Perl-based solutions.