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Bitten By the Red Hat Perl Bug

Posted by kdawson on from the 100x-between-friends dept.

snydeq writes "Smart coders always optimize the slowest thing. But what if 'the slowest thing' is the code supplied by your vendor? That was exactly the situation Vipul Ved Prakash discovered when he tinkered with a company Linux box on which Perl code was running at least 100 times slower than expected. The code, he found, was running on CentOS Linux, using Perl packages built by Red Hat. So Prakash got rid of the Perl executable that came with CentOS, compiled a new one from stock, and the bug disappeared. 'What's more disturbing,' McAllister writes, 'is that this Red Hat Perl performance issue is a known bug,' first documented in 2006 on Red Hat's own Bugzilla database. Folks affected by the current bug have two options: sit tight, or compile the Perl interpreter from source — effectively waiving your support contract. If a Linux vendor can't provide comprehensive maintenance and support for the open source software projects you depend on, McAllister asks, who ever will?"

4 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. waiving your support contract? by dougmc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Installing your own perl under /usr/local, leaving the system one alone under /usr, that waives your support contract?

    Seems unlikely, and if actually true, remarkably stupid.

    (However, messing with the perl under /usr, that would be a mistake. It could easily break other things that depended on that specific version ...)

    1. Re:waiving your support contract? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, it doesn't waive your support contract, but it does mean you will be relying on a subsystem that is not supported by the vendor - which validates the 'effectively' modifier in the original statement.

    2. Re:waiving your support contract? by /ASCII · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The company I work for does support for any Linux distribution, custom compiled packages, whatever. If the customer uses non-standard packages and oddball solutions, it often takes more time to solve their problems, but since we work by the hours, that's their problem.

      I find it hard to believe that businesses such as ours are unusual.

      --
      Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
  2. Re:CentOS it NOT Red Hat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And recompiling doesn't invalidate his support contract; as a CentOS user he doesn't have one.

    The summary is bullshit.