I thought it was common knowledge that the RH build was unsuitable for serious work. Guess he didn't get the memo. Did you notice the incredibly large @INC? Very annoying, that one. It's also got threading built in, which is also known as a drain on performance.

I've been building perl from source for as long as I've been using RH derived distros, going back as far as (I think) Fedora 3. It runs the socks off the system perl.