Well, I actually overlooked that, but it didn't give my any error, though mod_perl is usually a really complaining b***h :) No, there was no "shared" message in the logfiles. But I actually found out, what caused the hang, and I have to say, I'm pretty stupid that I posted before I looked: when you tie the session to the database it gets locked until you untie it again or goes out of scope. I tied the session and then tried to access the database for pulling out the messages... Stupid, isn't it? Ok, I rewrote it, and I have no more hangs now.

But I still can't get any usable results. I added a timestamp column to the session table to see if the session table actually gets accessed. The timestamp values change, as long as I get an Apache child which hasn't compiled the script yet, but then they don't. Plus, there isn't anything written into the database (no session values I want to put in).