Based on the few books that describe Apache module writing and a presentation that I've found on the web from an Apache conference, the advice to module writers is to remember that Apache calls the post-config phase twice - once while it's checking its configuration files, and then when it's ready to start up it discards all that and calls post-config again to really set things up.
But it appears to me (via tracing I've done in my own module) that post-config is actually called once at configuration file checking time, and then once per server process start (we're using MPM here) during the second (actual Apache startup phase). Is this correct?