Before optimizing, caching and tokenizing, I'd advise on benchmarking to see if it's worth the trouble (and obfuscation)...

You mentioned you're running your request through CGI, which would imply there's a whole bunch of overhead going on elsewhere, which may well slow you down more then P::RD itself...

I'm not saying you shouldn't optimize, cache or tokenize, but I'm saying you may want to make sure it would make a notable difference in performance in your production enviroment.

As for how to go about optimizing, caching or tokenizing if you do choose to do it: the other monks seem to have covered all that quite sufficiently... ;)