To give you a general idea of the issue, the application takes approximately 10 seconds to generate each page. Between 3 and 5 seconds is an "acceptable" load time, so there's a lot of work to do. I've made optimizations where possible, trying to improve the application's use of the database, but I've only shaved off a few milliseconds here and there. Again, I've limited myself becase I want to be able to upgrade later.

The overriding problem is that the application feels like it was written for Perl 4. By that I mean that there are lots of global variables, many local variables, and definitely no use strict. That makes running the application in mod_perl fairly difficult, if not impossible. Apache::Registry definitely seems to be out. Apache::PerlRun looks like my best bet. I've run across Good place to learn Apache::PerlRun, but given that the application feels like Perl 4 code, I am not very hopeful.

Finally, FastCGI and SpeedyCGI are probably out of the question because our systems group won't support either.

Do you think I have any options? I would prefer not to have to recommend a new hardware purchase.

Thanks,
-Daniel