CAVEAT: The cleanup handler may not complete on server shutdown/graceful restart since Apache will kill the registered handlers via SIGTERM, before they had a chance to run or even in the middle of its execution. See: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=106387845200003&r=1&w=2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=apache-modperl-dev&m=106427616108596&w=2