Apache-1.3.6, mod_perl 1.20,  php 3.0.11
Upgrading from php 3.0.8 to 3.0.11,  Apache crashes on start.

It turned out that the offending configuration was the startup.pl
loaded by mod_perl at start.

The startup.pl looks like this:

use strict;
use lib "/home/www/perl/lib";
$ENV{GATEWAY_INTERFACE} =~ /^CGI-Perl/ or die "GATEWAY_INTERFACE not Perl!";
use Apache::Registry;
use Apache::Status;
use Apache::DBI;
Apache::DBI->connect_on_init("dbi:Pg:dbname=web", "nobody", "");
use CGI (); CGI->compile(':all');
use CGI::Carp ();
use DBI ();
use DBD::Pg ();
1;

commenting out Apache::Status made Apache to start normally.