I see lots of "solutions" being tossed around here on a presumption of what the actual problem is. IS the source of the performance issue ACTUALLY the overhead of launching a new Perl? If the program blindly launches a new subprocess with every request, the problem might simply be "thrashing." Maybe the application needs a way to put a cap on how many children are running at a time. You say that most of the scripts are trivial, but how many are run most often? Are any of them actually expensive? You need log files that you can analyze to see what the bottlenecks actually are. Guesses won't get you answers.