Clearly, before choosing an OS, you will want to make sure that mod_perl even runs on it! As you will have noticed throughout this book, mod_perl 1.x is traditionally a Unix-centric solution. Although it also runs on Windows, there are several limitations related to its implementation.

The problem is that Apache on Windows uses a multithreaded implementation, due to the fact that Windows can't use the multi-process scheme deployed on Unix platforms. However, when mod_perl (and thereby the Perl runtime) is built into the Apache process, it cannot run multithreaded, because before Version 5.8.0 the Perl runtime wasn't thread-safe.

What does this mean for you? Well, essentially it means that your Apache process will be able to serve only one request at a time, just like when using httpd -X. Of course, this becomes a severe performance hit, making you unable to have more than one user receiving a page at a time. The situation is resolved in mod_perl 2.0, however, thanks to advances in both Apache and Perl, as described in Chapter 24. Furthermore, you can still use mod_perl on Windows for development, although you should follow the considerations below when choosing the production OS.