I've recently moved away from Perl and Mason for web hosting into the world of C++ and CGI with Wt.
But for my own future reference, for if/when I need to do something with Perl in Apache, I can refer to Falko Timme's article on Speeding Up Perl Scripts With SpeedyCGI/PersistentPerl On Debian Etch as a reference on how to make Perl fast in Apache.