Mod_perl2 too greedy on memory

[Rasmus Solmer Eriksen]

Mod_perl2 too greedy on memory

We have installed Apache2 with Mod_perl2 on a Suse 9 Linux distribution.

Compared with out usual setup with mod_perl-1.29 and Apache1.3, the new installation with  mod_perl-2.0.1 has increased the memory consumption by 5 times.

The following line are from the "ps aux" command:
wwwrun   28464  0.0  0.3 55128 14284 ?       S    16:12   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
wwwrun   28744  1.3  2.0 242312 79268 ?      S    16:15   0:05 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2/httpd-perl.conf –DBACKEND

The Mod_perl enabled httpd2-prefork uses more than 200 MB memory, meaning that I can only spawn about 30 servers with 5 GB physical memory.

What could be wrong? Is it a setup problem ?
Do I need to recompile the standard Suse binary and restrict myself from using the upstream package function?

Thanks in advance
Rasmus Eriksen
Metropol Online
Copenhagen - Denmark