drifter has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings fellow monks and initiates. I recently ran into some issues while upgrading mod_perl. On one of our webservers which was used mostly for development I noticed the pages that used the actual perlHandler would give out a segfault. When i run the perl scripts that actually generate the html it would just coredump. Ok, definetly not what I expected, so I started tracing the problem, and running the scripts with warnings just gave me the message "object method request() not found in Apache.pm". In the script itself I used: "my $r = Apache->request;" Now that sounded strange enough so I debugged it at first with the perl debugger, which basically led me nowhere, so I used Data::Dumper to printout the possible methods in "Apache.pm". At this point another perl hacker joined me to boggle at the problem, pointing out that I probably should just dump it and log everything, but after that restore the server back to a "stable" state. Now I've bumped into this problem a few times before, but I've never in fact had so good logs left of everything that I could have fully debugged out what was the real problem. Has anyone else ran into this particular problem?

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Re: Weird(?) behavoiur with mod_perl 1.26
by mitd (Curate) on Aug 08, 2001 at 06:28 UTC
    One bit of pre-advice with questions concerning mod_perl and the many Apache::xxxx modules it is best to include OS type and Apache version. It helps :)

    First check to see if mod_perl has been installed as a DSO. There are known issues with this and as far as I know they have not yet been resolved. Symptoms can be anything from Apache dieing silently on start-up to perl handlers segfaulting unexpectedly.

    The solution is to compile mod_perl into Apache statically. I know that this is a pain in the hockey puck, especially when you have to upgrade several servers but it is the only way I have found to assure stabilty.

    Hope that this is your situation and this helps.

    mitd-Made in the Dark
    'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'