DCT efficiency

System

I had always heard that fork and dbopen were two expensive operations. I am working with a DCT that has 5 inline statements, 4 of which fork Perl scripts that open database connections, mostly to populate drop-down options. Other than writing the entire DCT as one monster inline is there any way to improve the efficiency? I tried writing all the options in FormAPI generated by a single inline, but that breaks in IE5.5, and anyway if they're in a replicant then you have to repopulate them every time they add an instance.

It takes about 15 seconds for this DCT to open (with no other users on the system) and I'm probably not done yet; I'm afraid it will be ridiculous once I start opening large DCRs.

Is there any form of connection pooling available for Perl?