Thanks everyone for their suggestions; I'll look into it and report back.
I would love to switch from CGI to a persistent setup. Everything runs on IIS on Windows 2003. Has anyone actually gotten FastCGI to work properly with Perl on Win2003/IIS? If so, I would love to hear it and get a pointer to any docs/downloads.
I spent many hours investigating this, and it seemed that FastCGI didn't work on Win2003 (and I could never get it to work on Win2008 either). But I never posted to forum directly about it...