To see where an httpd process is spinning, the first step is to add the following to your startup file:

package Book::StartUp;
use Carp ( );
$SIG{'USR2'} = sub { 
    Carp::confess("caught SIGUSR2!");
};

The above code assigns a signal handler for the USR2signal. This signal has been chosen because it's unlikely to be used by the other server components.

We can check the registered signal handlers with help of Apache::Status. Using this code, if we fetch the URL http://localhost/perl-status?sig we will see:

USR2 = \&Book::StartUp::_ _ANON_ _

where Book::StartUp is the name of the package declared in startup.pl.

After applying this server configuration, let's use the simple code in Example 21-10, where sleep(10000) will emulate a hanging process.

Example 21-10. debug/perl_trace.pl

local $|=1;
my $r = shift;
$r->send_http_header('text/plain');

print "[$$] Going to sleep\n";
hanging_sub( );

sub hanging_sub { sleep 10000; }

We execute the above script as http://localhost/perl/debug/perl_trace.pl. In the script we use $|=1; to unbuffer the STDOUT stream and we get the PID from the $$special variable.

Now we issue the kill command, using the PID we have just seen printed to the browser's window:

panic% kill -USR2 PID

and watch this showing up in the error_log file:

caught SIGUSR2!
    at /home/httpd/perl/startup/startup.pl line 32
Book::StartUp::_ _ANON_ _('USR2') called 
    at /home/httpd/perl/debug/perl_trace.pl line 6
Apache::ROOT::perl::debug::perl_trace_2epl::hanging_sub( ) called 
    at /home/httpd/perl/debug/perl_trace.pl line 5
Apache::ROOT::perl::debug::perl_trace_2epl::handler('Apache=SCALAR(0x8309d08)') 
  called 
    at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i386-linux/Apache/Registry.pm 
      line 140
eval {...} called 
    at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i386-linux/Apache/Registry.pm
      line 140
Apache::Registry::handler('Apache=SCALAR(0x8309d08)') called 
    at PerlHandler subroutine `Apache::Registry::handler' line 0
eval {...} called 
    at PerlHandler subroutine `Apache::Registry::handler' line 0

We can clearly see that the process "hangs" in the code executed at line 6 of the /home/httpd/perl/debug/perl_trace.pl script, and it was called by the hanging_sub( ) routine defined at line 5.