Mutant has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

If I have a PerlHandler directive in a Location container, will the PerlHandler get loaded into memory even if that Location isn't hit?

eg. if I have

<Location /someurl/>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler MyHandler
</Location>

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Will MyHandler get loaded into the child process if no one ever requests http://mydomain/someurl/ from that child process?

(Have consulted Apache/mod_perl docs, but can't seem to find anything relating to this)

Thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Apache/mod_perl configuration
by Jaap (Curate) on Dec 01, 2004 at 12:49 UTC
    In short: yes it does. You can test it by having the perl script write output to a file. When you restart the server, you will find that the file is written.

    Edit: according to perrin, it doesn't.
[reply]
      No, it does not. That module will not be loaded until the location is requested. To load it at startup, you would have to call it with a PerlModule or PerlRequire or load it from startup.pl.
[reply]
      Is there some way to prevent this happening? I assume this occurs accross other containers (such as VirtualHost)?
[reply]
        It does happen across other containers too yes. I assume you cannot prevent this because it's what mod_perl does: load the thing into memory to be ready when someone makes a request.
[reply]

        (I'm taking Jaap's answer at face value. I don't remember much about mod_perl.)

        What are you trying to accomplish? There might be other ways of accomplishing what you want to accomplish. One thing you could do is to have a barebones handler that loads up the full module and calls it:

        sub handler {
   require Full::Module;
   goto(&Full::Module::handler);
}

        [download]

        (You might have to fool with the args in @_ a little. I don't remember what args a handler receives.)

        Of course, once the module is loaded, it will stay loaded.

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[d/l]

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