APM: Apache mod_perl and large memory data cache

[Evan Harris]

I have a mod_perl application that I need to store a large amount of data in
ram, in the form of a huge multilevel hash.  The problem is that apache
seems to store this data in each child process, meaning I have apache child
processes with a larger than 50meg memory footprint, which is way too big.

It's my understanding that I can use a startup file to preload things,
but the functions to load the data use many of the request r-> functions,
which I don't have access to in the startup file.

I may be able to rewrite my functions not to use the request functions, but
I don't want to embark on that task unless I know for sure that the
resulting data structure will reside in shared memory space.  Does anyone
know for sure?  Is there another (better) way to do this?

Evan