The document discusses various approaches for efficient shared data in Perl, including files, shared memory, databases, and caching modules. It provides an overview of common caching and database modules for Perl like Cache::Cache, Cache::Mmap, MLDBM::Sync, BerkeleyDB, IPC::MM, Tie::TextDir, IPC::Shareable, DBD::SQLite, DBD::MySQL and memcached. It also describes testing methodology and analysis of performance results for different approaches when varying factors like number of clients and read/write ratios.