In order to deal with apache's problems handling a high load, I wrote a trivial pure perl server with few features. http://www.documentroot.com/code/ppcgid Since it's nonforking, it's not appropriate if your web pages block on IO, or if some of them are much slower than others, etc.
But it's blazingly fast for certain kinds of applications. I based on the IO::Select "multiplexing" code from O'reilly. It's hastily written and probably buggy, and doesn't support HTTP features like keepalive which could speed it up, and there's probably a zillion things in it that can be sped up. But it's way faster than apache/mod_perl. - Erik
