Problem with long http request generation time - process restarting

Hi --

I am getting the following message recurring in my log:

Parent: child process exited with status 255 -- Restarting.

followed by the process restart sequence.

I have tracked it down to a call to $r->content which doesn't seem to
return properly.

It would appear that

1. The POST request has Encoding-type: chunked (message total length is
~5kb);

2. The client sends the HTTP headers, then pauses 3-4 seconds while it
generates the body of the message (confirmed with WireShark);

3. So when I call $r-content, when it succeeds I see a 3-4 second pause
before it completes;

4. If another request arrives during the call to $r->content, the process
aborts and restarts - I assume it is interfering with the read() call in
$r->content.

Since the pause is so long, it is very likely to be interrupted even though
I only have 5 clients currently :(

Given the the chunked implemenation in mod_perl 2.0 is apparently
incomplete, have I struck one area where this affects the result?

Can anyone make suggestions as to how I can work around this problem?  I
wondered about maybe moving my handler to the log phase (currently it's a
Response handler), by which time I assume the entire message must be
available, but it seems like a major kludge and presumably would lead to
other issues anyway.

Or is there some multi-threading thing I should have done - currently I
have not really done anything specific...

I am using Apache2.2 on Win7 (no flames please :)), with ActiveState Perl
"(v5.12.2) built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread".

Andrew