It wasn't until recently that I realized that the functionality of AutoLoader might actually be counter-productive for mod_perl, at least in a prefork MPM.
Because routines are loaded when they are requested, they may be loaded in child processes, causing duplication in memory because they are not shared. They would be shared if they would be loaded in the initialization phase before the child processes are forked. But in that phase you wouldn't call all of those routines that you might need in the child processes. I was therefore thinking about the development of a module that would just go through %INC and check each of the modules for auto/*.al files and do() all of them (possibly limited by a hash keyed to module names with subroutine lists). And then possibly disable AutoLoader altogether, so no memory would inadvertently be lost by routines being loaded by child processes. Does such a beast exist already? If not, would such a module make sense? What would be a good name for it? Liz
