The only global variable I'm using is AUTOLOAD. I'm coding in OO style and using inheritance. I'm using AUTOLOAD for more flexibility in my object structures.

package Entities::Entity;

our $AUTOLOAD;
use constant UNDEF_VALUE => '##UNDEF_VALUE##';

sub new() {
    my ($class) = @_;
    my $self = {
    };
    bless $self, $class;
    return $self;
}

sub AUTOLOAD {
    my ($self, $val) = @_;
    
    my $type = ref($self) or croak "$self is not an object";

    my $name = $AUTOLOAD;
    $name =~ s/.*://;   # strip fully-qualified portion
    if (defined($val)) {
        if ($val eq UNDEF_VALUE) {
            $self->{$name} = undef;
        } else {
            return $self->{$name} = $val;
        }
    } else {
        my $val = $self->{$name};
        $self->{$name} = undef unless (defined($val));
        if (ref($val) eq "HASH") {
            return \%$val;
        }
        if (ref($val) eq "ARRAY") {
            return \@$val;
        }
        return $val;
    }
}
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package Customer::Entities::CustomerInvoice;

use base qw(Entities::Entity);

sub new {
    my ($class) = @_;

    my $self = $class->SUPER::new();
    return $self;
}
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On the other hand, everytime a new request comes in, new objects are created. If the member's values were cached, nothing would work properly I guess. Also, my debug messages show that each object is different.

On the database end, the only package level global variable is a hash holding the database handles. I do not do any explicit caching. There is also no cached queries in mysql.

I was suspecting apache/modperl to do some transparent query result caching for long running queries. Could it be the case ? (for info, I'm running ActivePerl 5.10, Apache 2.2, XP SP2).

I thought I would try to look into apache's memory and see what objects are still in cache after a request but I cannot find a repository for the B-Size module. Any idea where to find this ? (probably different topic)

Thanks