Under mod_perl, processes don't quit after serving a single request. Thus, $^T gets initialized to the server startup time and retains this value throughout the process's life. Even if you don't use this variable directly, it's important to know that Perl refers to the value of $^T internally.

For example, Perl uses $^T with the -M, -C, or -A file test operators. As a result, files created after the child server's startup are reported as having a negative age when using those operators. -M returns the age of the script file relative to the value of the $^Tspecial variable.

If you want to have -M report the file's age relative to the current request, reset $^T, just as in any other Perl script. Add the following line at the beginning of your scripts:

local $^T = time;

You can also do:

local $^T = $r->request_time;

The second technique is better performance-wise, as it skips the time( ) system call and uses the timestamp of the request's start time, available via the $r->request_time method.

If this correction needs to be applied to a lot of handlers, a more scalable solution is to specify a fixup handler, which will be executed during the fixup stage:

sub Apache::PerlBaseTime::handler {
    $^T = shift->request_time;
    return Apache::Constants::DECLINED;
}

and then add the following line to httpd.conf:

PerlFixupHandler Apache::PerlBaseTime

Now no modifications to the content-handler code and scripts need to be performed.