Thanks for the suggestions.
I should have mentionned that the machine has dual Xeon processors and 2Gb of RAM. Running top shows a ridiculously low load average. This server runs only 2 sites, both with the same Apache and mod_perl versions, but different installs. Strangely enough the other site has never shown that error. The only obvious difference between the 2 sites is that the one with the trouble is being accessed by a much larger number of simultaneous users, although 90 users can hardly qualify as heavy load (or am I wrong?).
Also the last occurences of this error pointed to a place in the Perl script that is very plain, just a variable assignment. It seemed to have just died at that point. The puzzling thing is that it did that about a dozen times for different users at exactly the same spot. (I know this is not a Perl list, my point is that I don't believe there is an error in the script itself that would cause this.)
Anyway I will follow your leads and try and check the response time.
The error idicates that something went wrong at the OS level, not mod_perl and not Apache. That means that you may have problems in your setup and it needs to be tuned. Your statement that exactly the same code on a different machine doesn't have this problem supports this possibility.
The problem happens in exactly the same place is because it's where you do IO with your system. Since you never showed what code you are talking about I can't even suggest what could possible go wrong. We don't even know what OS you are on.
Please remember to tell us more about your system/setup and then we will be able to be more helpful than just waving hands. http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ gives easy to follow intructions on what do we need to know.
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