Haha, I had my return value (1;) from the require above my DBI connection, so none of it was getting passed in mod_perl (worked fine in mod_cgi), and thus it was causing a cascade of problems that showed rss_function causing the error.

whew, this brings to light that I need to start making more objects, less environment to deal with.

By the way, I do have a reverse proxy installed for the static site content, I guess the problem propagates everywhere when you keep everything in memory. Anyways, thanks for your help!