look up Apache::DBI and Apache::DBI::connect_on_init
that should speed up your system quite a bit - as you're connecting to the DB on every request
you can also pre-cache your Petal templates on startup- if you're using the 2.19 patch, just pass in the 'cache_only' flag, and it will compile to disk+memory
you have petal's disk caching off too. having that on will save a chunk of time between restarts and child processes
