My understanding is that a single DSO on disk can be "shared" between
two instances, but the text sections of such will not be shared in
physical RAM between two instances which load it, because the code will
get fixed up and hence copied-on-write. Is that not the case?
That is the correct understanding.
So the trade-off for the default is between a performance hit in, I'd
say, by far the the normal case (running a single Apache instance), or a
memory hit in the less common case of running >1 instance concurrently.
The point is that the current behaviour needs to be retained
for installations which would be negatively affected by your
patch. Building non-PIC as default is ok, if a switch is
provided to build PIC.
- Sascha