You only have to restart after updates of the code. If you can't do that you shouldn't deploy work in progress to a production server.

Anyway, depending on your version of mod_perl; for mod_perl 1.X you can use Apache::StatInc which will reload modules if they've been changed (this can mess up stuff if you have cached data/dependencies, but for simple modules it should work).

For mod_perl 2.X (and apparently also, 1.X) you can use Apache::Reload / Apache2::Reload , which does more or less the same.

updated: fixed link to apache::reload