This is somewhat of a tricky question. Assuming you're running Apache on *nix, each child will be forked off into it's own process. Therefore, if you make a variable global, it will only be global to that child. However, if you make the same variable name global in each child to the same value (via a database, or something similar), then you will have some sort of psudo-global variable. Nonetheless, to have a variable that is global to the Parent and each child is not possible; at least from my knowledge of mod_perl and Apache (someone correct me if I'm wrong here).