The Sentinel

mod_perl provides a number of server lifecycle handlers, which allow you to hook various parts of the initiation sequence to log configuration files or logging before Apache starts handling your individual requests. Unfortunately, for reasons still not clear, when I tried to run initialization in the PerlChildInitHandler, it would correctly initialize but then the values would get re-initialized back to defaults when the PerlReponseHandler fired.

The solution, and not all that satisfying, was to switch to the PerlPostConfigHandler, which did not suffer from that problem and has the added benefit of using shared memory across the multiple processes.

PerlModule Handler
PerlModule Apache2::Reload
PerlOpenLogsHandler Handler::open_logs
PerlPostConfigHandler Handler::post_config
PerlSetVar ReloadDirectories ¨/mnt/hgfs/src/api/lib¨
<Location /event>
   SetHandler modperl   
   PerlResponseHandler Handler::handler
   PerlInitHandler Apache2::Reload
</Location>