Sorry, it's just not true. There is no sharing between perl threads unless you declare it, and perl threads are what mod_perl uses. Now, you can load data during startup, and it will be copied into each thread (or process), but it will not be shared. As soon as you write anything to it after startup, the thread you did the writing in will have a different version of it than all the others.

The script that you've shown here will show a seprate count for every thread. The only way tha variable could be the same for every request with this script is if you are actually only running one thread, so everything keeps hitting the same one. If you don't believe me, ask our resident threads expert, liz, or ask on the mod_perl list.