That tends to suggest that you use a lot of short-lived, high-frequency (and possibly high-concurrency) and./or IO-bound apps? The archetypal example of which is dynamic http serving, though there are obviously many other server type applications that also fit the bill.

It's for this type of application that mod_perl/fastcgi are designed to alleviate exactly the problems you describe. It's not hard to see how a similar approach could be used for non-http applications that fit this mode of operation. A daemon app that runs perpectually in the background with all the relevant code loaded and a small, fast front-end that simply fires the parameters to the daemon and retrieves the results.

Most of my stuff runs in the exact opposite way. Long-lived and infrequently called apps performing cpu-intensive operations on large volumes of data and run for hours or days.