Thanks. That removes one mystery if it's a kernel message! I'm not seeing any evidence of leaks, although sometimes these things flare up suddenly and disappear almost before you can catch them.

I think any kind of trace, monitor or logging is pretty much a non-starter given how long the process runs before it crashes. The monitoring will slow it down and/or create huge logs.

What I have done is put some extra variables into the die message from IPC::Run so hopefully in another couple of days I should know more about the argument data. Whether that will help, I'm not sure, since the program happily recalculates the particular graph when it is restarted.

Hi,

I do see the problem of logging everything. But in your case I'm pretty sure that you have to see the whole process until the argument list is too long. I guess that there is some weired case of accumulation as I said before.

Anyway, IMHO you don't have to change the code of IPC::Run, as I'm sure you could catch the argument list this way (only an example):

my $gv = GraphViz2->new(%args);
eval {
   $gv->run();
};
if(my $rc = $@) {
   print STDERR "argument string: " . $gv->dot_input . "\n";
   confess $rc;
}
[download]

I'm really curious whether you catch your bug. Perhaps you have the time to tell us.

Happy digging
McA