What you are failing to understand here is that your handler is not an object, it is just a class. In fact, it's not even called as class unless you tell mod_perl to use method handlers, which you haven't done here. In the examples in the docs, someone subclasses Apache::Request and then instantiates an object like this:

my $apr = My::Apache::Request::Subclass->new($r);
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That is not what happens when mod_perl calls your handler. It doesn't call new, since new() is not a special method in Perl. It calls handler (well, you could tell it to call something else, but it's not important), passing an Apache::request object (note the lowercase r) as the only parameter. This object is normally referred to as $r, and it's the same thing you get by calling Apache->request().

At this point, you can create an Apache::Request object by passing $r to Apache::Request->new(), or instantiate a subclass of Apache::Request in the same way. You can even make it so that other people will get your subclass object when they call Apache->request() by calling it as a set method:

Apache->request($apr);
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However, there is almost never a good reason to subclass Apache::Request and I don't understand why you think this will help with your session management woes. Apache::Request has nothing to do with session management. It only exists for the current request and nothing in it is saved when it goes away. So, please explain what you are really trying to do, and maybe I can suggest a better solution.

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