Are you trying to use Apache pooling within mod_perl? I tried that for a while and gave up due to lock contention issues, switching to a paradigm where I opened, transacted, closed without caching any database stuff and my locking issues went away. This means among other things, no persistent prepared statements.
-- “The aeroplane is fatally defective. It is merely a toy—a sporting play-thing. It can never become commercially practical." -- Nikola Tesla
