I have done a few grep around, and i am still looking into it, but in the meanwhile I have stumbled upon this HP-UX information sheet, and we can see the 30000 number coincides with the failsafe and default value for process_id_max. But these settings seem to work correctly, past pid 30000 the iteration starts over with a low pid number and continues to increment. Still, impossible to call more than 30,000 perl scripts per apache 'restarts'.