[Catalyst] Development environments and performance

[Ian Docherty]

I would just like to canvas opinion on a good development environment 
and practices for Catalyst since we are starting to have some 
performance issues.

We are running on a managed server (Red Hat Enterprise), Apache2, MySql 5.1

We have several people developing on this machine (about 5), each with 
their own sandboxes.

I have set up apache so that each developer runs their Catalyst 
application under fast-cgi.

We are beginning to see some performance issues especially with several 
people testing at the same time on different fast-cgi processes.

The 'top' command shows 'server.pl' and 'perl' taking the bulk of the 
cpu time.

Best case for a simple dynamic page in Catalyst to respond is about 5 
seconds. With several people testing at the same time it can take  30 
seconds or more to respond to a simple page. I would have hoped for only 
a second or so on such a lightly loaded server.

so.
Is the problem likely to be the setup we are using? (we can't use 
mod-perl since I believe we can't run multiple versions of the same 
application)

Could we have problems in the performance of our application. Should we 
start thinking about profiling it to see where the time is going? (If 
so, are there any pointers on how best to do this?)

Any other ideas?

Regards
Ian