You may be following the same primrose path that I just went down. The bottom line was, no shared-host shop that my client had ever heard of (I know that there are others who specialize in Perl...) would deploy Apache with quite... enough memory to do the job. I had to switch to a dedicated-host.

I rather doubt that your experience would be much different. If resources are a problem, it's undoubtedly some artificial limit that just has to be bypassed. Otherwise you drop fairly-immediately into the land of “diminishing returns...” where, even if you could get it to work, it's not worth the effort.