I've got the same misgivings about File::MMagic and File::MMagic::XS as you. File::MimeInfo::Magic looks like a nicely written module, but I'm concerned about using it in my mod_perl app, because loading the module plus the magic data consumes 2-3MB of memory - memory which will become less shared with time because it lives in Perl rather than in a library.

File::LibMagic is an XS interface to libmagic and, while it still loads 1.6MB of data, that data can be shared between children. It's not a great interface though.

I'm considering just using a system call to file, and lose a bit of performance in order to save some memory as, in my case, these mime-type checks happen seldom.

Clint