If you are truly committed to running Perl...

your best option would be this:

Port 80 : Nginx serves static and proxies to Perl system
Port 80xx : Perl system ; either apache+fcgi or apache+mod_perl ...
you might be able to run things under perlbal via plugins, but i dunno.

The ideal situation would be running fcgi under nginx, but I found it
a PITA to set up / maintain.

I caved in and ran some perl apps through apache+mod_fcgi , and its
pretty nice. Nginx handles most of the requests itself, so 2 apache
children are handling a decent amount of traffic.

I have a few production projects running nginx on 80 and proxying back
to mod_perl enabled apache. They work great, but they're apps
designed to utilize a bunch of MP + Apache2 features... nginx was
brought in a few years ago to increase improvement... and it was
miraculous: nginx does awesome queuing/handoff of the mp traffic, so
all apache does is process mod_perl fast and instantly. no lazy
client issues, no wasting resources on bloated servers.

in practice.. i haven't found /that/ much difference between a fine-
tuned Apache+ModPerl , PHP ( via apache+mod_php or fcgi ) , Python
( django / pylons ) setup. Sure you can have a system where php+fcgi
is taking up 50MB of ram while Apache+ModPerl is taking up 150... but
to tweak the performance to equal one another you'd use a PHP cache
that takes up 135MB of ram... making everything pretty darn negligble.