Hi,

>    The question to the list, are there other solution approaches that might
>    be better? Any significant disadvantages to using rlm_perl as I've
>    described? Would it be better to write a custom module instead, hoping
>    that by doing so there may be some performance improvements?

PERL method should be fine...the alternative is the latest HEAD (3.x) pre-release
code which actually has an rlm_rest module  (so no writing of a module to be done!)

alan