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Bitten By the Red Hat Perl Bug
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?"
I don't mean to troll but real haxorz use Debian or Slackware...
Smile, don't click...
on baby...donc't BSDI is also dead, Give other people More gay than they pallid bodies and serves to reinforce
If speed is so important for the author of the article, wouldn't something written in C using libxml be a better choice than using (what I'm assuming) are XML modules written exclusively in Perl?
I started with Redhat 4.0. I had been with them quite a long time. I was quite a fan.
I wasted most of a YEAR trying to get Redhat's version to work. The simplest code would fail, unless you built everything from scratch. Loading updated RPMs caused it to fail again. It was quarter-past-annoying. This was the time Redhat was getting ready it's $91M purchase of the Netscape Directory.
And surprise! Once Netscape's Directory came out, OpenLDAP worked on Redhat again.
I was pissed. There's no reason the exact same code working on other platforms should remain busted [for a YEAR(!)] just because they're making an investment.
It's why I've run Ubuntu ever since. It loaded and RAN, successfully LDAP on the first attempt, and not once have I ever had the feeling I was being 'played'.
Way to go, Redhat.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov