Working around refcnt assertion failure in perl

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

Hello.

Recently I found a problem, looks like perl bug, posted here: RT#122112 (proof of concept code attached).
In short: "refcnt: fd -1 < 0" assertion triggered.
But this is just bug report, and I need to find workaround for old/current perl versions (bug reproducible in 5.12-5.20).

It seems that any workflow like that:

eval {
  local $SIG{ALRM}=sub{die};
  alarm 10;
  # fork child
  # exec in child (exec made in child to separate exec failures from p
+rogram exit code)
};
[download]

_might_ be affected, when ALARM triggered. currently this happening in MIME::Lite for us (related code).

Searching for possible solution to execute external program, with ALRM timeout, without risk running into this.

Comment on Working around refcnt assertion failure in perl Download Code

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Re: Working around refcnt assertion failure in perl by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 19, 2014 at 09:38 UTC
The only idea that I have would be to decouple mail sending from the rest of your program. Write the mail into a database or a file, and then later have a job go through and send these mails, potentially with a more lenient timeout and without `fork+exec` involved.	[reply] [d/l]