Our site architecture tries to isolate all non-trivial logic from the .epl files which are actually displayed. This has paid off in a large way when parts of the site have to be changed around.

Unfortunately, it means most of the core logic behind the site lives in perl modules - and changes to them aren't noticed automatically. Any method that requires explicitly reloading a given method or module is unacceptable - it would be too much work to modify all 1200 .epl files to explicitly reload every module they use.

Actually, like I said, I've already solved it. It's only a dev issue - for production we want to have as much caching as possible (to the point that we'll even cache database query results within modules). On a dev box I've found that setting MaxRequestsPerChild to 1 in the apache config file does the job (this forces apache to fork a new process for each incoming connection - which incidentally starts a new perl interpreter in mod_perl).

Makes things rather slow to run, but that's much better than adding special case code to every .epl file (~1200) for every method in one of our home-grown modules (~700).