Webserver

Of course you should use mod_perl (http://perl.apache.org/). It's much faster (~ * 100) than pure cgi. But needs more RAM. So your httpd with mod_perl will be about 16 MB (~10MB shared).

And you can have establish datababase connections on process startup (httpd). This saves also time (see README.webserver).

Use the scripts/apache-perl-startup.pl startup script for your mod_perl webserver to be faster (see README.webserver).

If you have a really large installation (over 1000 new tickets a day and over 40 Agents) is a good idea to read "Choosing the Right Strategy" (http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/strategy.html).

Anyway, if your bandwidth is a little bit small use mod_gzip (http://www.schroepl.net/projekte/mod_gzip/). If you have a html page with 45k, mod_gzip compress it. The page will be about 7k. That's really nice.