[MTOS-dev] Check your perl module versions now

[Jay Allen]

Hi all,

Yesterday I observed a pretty significant memory leak occurring on
movabletype.org when the run-periodic-tasks framework was being used
in daemon mode to initiate background publishing.  Reed and Su
reminded me of Ogawa-san bootstrapping script[1] which uses
Devel::Leak::Object to monitor all objects for memory leaks.  So, I
used the same methodology on RPT as Hirotaka did on mt.cgi.  What I
found was not what I expected: DBI had a massive memory leak.

I immediately checked the version and found it to be the same one
available to 'yum': 1.48  Unfortunately, that is NOT the latest in
CPAN[2] (1.604) and in fact v1.48 was release more than THREE YEARS
AGO.  Once I installed the new version, RPT worked perfectly without a
single memory leak.   You should make sure that you are running AT
LEAST version 1.52[3] since that was the most recent version
mentioning fixes for memory leaks.

Along the way, however, I found other modules which were outdated on
yum and upgraded those as well.  It goes without saying but I'll say
it anyway: Keeping your infrastructure upgraded will pay off major
short-term and long-term gains.  Do not ignore it.

-- 
Jay Allen
Endevver Consulting
415-200-6985

[1] - http://www.sixapart.com/pipermail/mtos-dev/2008-March/000735.html
[2] - http://search.cpan.org/~timb/DBI/Changes
[3] - http://search.cpan.org/~timb/DBI/Changes#Changes_in_DBI_1.52_(svn_rev_6840),_30th_July_2006