Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value

[Dustin D.]

I'm having countless problems with mod_perl and not even sure where to
start.  I thought I had mod_perl up and running in my development
environment, so I pushed the new changes + apache configuration out to my
production environment, and immediately began tail -f on the logs.

What I noticed was, most of the time, everything was working fine.  But it
seemed like every few minutes, there would be a burst of the following
errors:

Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at modules//MySQLBroker.pm
line 1059.\n

What's strange is, when this error would pop up, it would flood 5-10 errors
like this in a row, all within the span of a few seconds.  Then things would
return to normal and I wouldn't get any errors for awhile.

On my site, I'm getting hits every couple of seconds, if not more
frequently.  In my startup.pl, I have something like this to initialize the
MySQL connection:

Apache::DBI->connect_on_init("DBI:mysql:mydb:127.0.0.1", "dustin", "mypass",
   {
    PrintError => 1, # warn( ) on errors
    RaiseError => 0, # don't die on error
    AutoCommit => 1, # commit executes immediately
   }
);

(NOTE: for the hostname, I was using localhost for awhile, and decided to
use a direct ip in case localhost is actually being resolved, to get rid of
one more layer of translation)

My code around line 1059 in MySQLBroker.pm looks like this:

sub _mysql_exec {
 my ($self, $dbcall) = @_;
 my @resultsArray;
 my $count=0;
 my $sth = $self->{_dbh}->prepare("$dbcall");
 $sth->execute or die "Cannot execute database command!";
 while (my @array = $sth->fetchrow) {
   push @resultsArray, [EMAIL PROTECTED];
 }
 $sth->finish;
 return [EMAIL PROTECTED];
}

Also, on a fairly inconsistent basis, I'm also getting "not a CODE
reference" errors.

To me, it just seems like mod_perl is very unreliable and unpredictable.
The same code that worked reliably (albeit slow) in the CGI world is now
extremely unpredictable in the mod_perl world.

FYI, I'm aware of the persistent state issues in a mod_perl world and have
gone to great lengths to debug any persistent state issues that might be
affecting things.

At this point in time, I'm extremely tempted to rewrite everything in PHP.
I really want to avoid that, but mod_perl is causing me too many headaches
to justify it, as I've already wasted a week of effort trying to migrate my
site from CGI to mod_perl.

Thanks,
Dustin