Re: Memory leak in LWP is not cured with perl's malloc()

Byron Brummer (byron@omix.com)
Fri, 23 Jul 1999 14:01:03 +0000 (GMT) 

Ilya Ketris <ilya@gde.to> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 01:41:12PM +0900, Marc Langheinrich wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 02:41:24AM +0300, Ilya Ketris wrote:
> > > 	This program grows in size.  If you substitute
> > > 	'http://www' with 'www', making it invalid URI, or with
> > > 	'http://nosuchhost', making it not to resolve, it does
> > > 	NOT grow.  'ftp://ftphost' grows as well.
> > The above program works fine (i.e. without leaks) for me (constant use of
> > about 2.0% after 2:00 minutes):
> 
> 	I am not saying it would leak for everybody.  What I am saying is
> 	that it leaks for me, and it did so on RedHat 5.1, RedHat 5.2,
> 	RedHat 6.0, and SuSE something, all pretty standard.  If running on
> 	BSD or using perl5.00502 prevents that it doesn't mean it's not
> 	there.  Several people reported the leak, they can't _all_ be wrong.

	"Pass/fail" reports are to help track down the problem, not to try
	and say that the bug report is bogus.

> 	As I haven't heard of serious memory problems with neither Linux nor
> 	perl by themselves, I conclude that it's LWP at fault here.

	But that's just it and exactly the reason Marc, myself, and others
	reported our pass/fail results.

	If it happened across all or even most perls, it would point more to
	LWP.  The fact is however, that it only happends on some perls on
	some particular variations of Linux (so far).  This type of
	condition is more commonly associated with a local configuration
	issue then perl itself.

	It could be nearly anything, really.  And no offense, but Linux
	being what it is doesn't help track it down ("Linux" really being an
	entire family of systems...).  It could be a local kernel patch, a
	particular libc bug (libc, glibc, which version?), another perl
	module (LWP relies on libnet, maybe there is a bug in a particular
	release of libnet?  Or...?).

-- 
-Zenin (zenin@archive.rhps.org)

        My code is filled with comments!  It's just that my comments are
        written in Perl.