TODO with embedded Perl support.

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Folks,

I am writing to enumerate the known problems with embedded Perl support 
in Nagios.

Since moving from Perl 5.005 I have become aware of these issues. I 
don't think they have much, if anything, to do with Nagios.

It seems that the embedded Perl support with a threaded Perl suffers 
from

1 heavy leak rate 600 kB - 1 MB/hour 

This is way above what I was happy to tolerate with a non threaded Perl.

2 Problems with p1.pl

Perl will SEGV (taking an embedded Perl Nag) with it if the p1.pl 
debugging hooks are used ie

setting DEBUG or GARRULOUS in the p1.pl text and an accompanying log 
file does not track the plugin execution (as it did with older Perls) 
but causes a SEGV in Perl.

p1.pl with the default log level (ie no plugin trace) works Ok subject 
to the leak above

(FWIW, the SEGV comes from Perl whether called from C or from Perl; it 
is not the C code in checks.c that is causing this; the fault is in 
p1.pl or in libperl in the Perl port on this system. It seems strange 
that a Perl program can cause Perl to SEGV)

I am investigating both matters.

These things have only been checked on FreeBSD 4-10-RELEASE/Perl 5.8.5 
built with threads.

(if people want to contribute to this latter problem [SEGV], there is no 
need to have a working Nagios to do so. The problems can be duplicated 
from Perl. There is a tarball of code to play around with it).

Yours sincerely.

-- 
Stanley Hopcroft

IP Australia
Ph: (02) 6283 3189  Fax: (02) 6281 1353
PO Box 200 Woden  ACT 2606
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: disclaimer.txt
URL: <https://www.monitoring-lists.org/archive/developers/attachments/20050117/8acfc3a1/attachment.txt>