That sort of system sounds fairly slow - Windows 2000 Server on a 350 would be quite sluggish in the first place. Are you also using IE on the same system? You would have IE, IIS, Perl, and MySQL all trying to use the CPU at once, on a fairly slow CPU. When I had a P3 650 on my own computer, I noticed that browsing GForum was quite a bit slower on my system than other systems, just because of the load the browser adds. Try browsing from another computer and you should see a noticeable improvement.
Other things you might try are using MySQL (if you are currently using MS SQL), and possibly PerlEx from ActiveState - but the latter costs money.
Even for a 350, 5 seconds seems quite high. How high is the server's memory usage? Perhaps you are swapping, which would slow things down significantly.
Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads jason@gossamer-threads.com