I mean this has gotten better, but why don't you start building something again from scratch? I've got the time to help and move it towards something that is geared for DB/web front type applications..
Perl is nice cause it's flexible and runs on multiple OS's but it's not the best far as speed and scalabilty is concerned. Quite a few of us here do this sorta thing for a living and it would be nothing for us to at least take a look and do some code checking.. It never hurts for a second set of eyes to go over stuff.