Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

A.3. The Apache::RegistryLoader Class

Ordinarily, Apache::Registry scripts are not compiled until they are needed. This means that the very first time one of these scripts is required by a child process, there will be a delay while the script is loaded and compiled.

Apache::RegistryLoader was designed to avoid this delay by precompiling Apache::Registry scripts during the server startup phase. In addition to minimizing loading time, it also reduces memory consumption because the Registry scripts are compiled into the single server parent process before it forks off the flock of child servers. The memory occupied by this precompiled code is then shared among the children, and although there doesn't appear to be a difference in child process size when you invoke ps (on Unix systems), overall memory consumption is reduced. See the mod_perl_tuning document in the mod_perl distribution for more details.

Typically, you will invoke Apache::RegistryLoader from a Perl startup script. A typical entry looks like this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use MyFavoriteModule1 ();
use MyFavoriteModule2 ();
...
use Apache::RegistryLoader ();
my $rl = Apache::RegistryLoader->new;
$rl->handler('/perl/test.pl'=> '/home/www/perl/test.pl');
$rl->handler('/perl/test2.pl'=> '/home/www/perl/test2.pl');
...

This code creates a new Apache::RegistryLoader object by invoking the class's new() method and then calls this object's handler() method for each script you want to load. Apache::RegistryLoader is actually a ...