In http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=6364&user=Juerd one date appeared as 20040504183239. I don't know why. I do know I think it's scary. The HTML source in question: 

          <tr>
            <td>350619</td>
            <td><a HREF="/index.pl?node_id=350619">Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
+ Re: Gathering module usage statistics</a></td>
            <td>-1</td><td align="right">2004-05-04 18:41:28</td>
          </tr>
          <tr class="highlight">
            <td>350615</td>
            <td><a HREF="/index.pl?node_id=350615">Re: Re^3: Gathering
+ module usage statistics</a></td>
            <td>2</td><td align="right">20040504183239</td>
          </tr>
          <tr>
            <td>350612</td>
            <td><a HREF="/index.pl?node_id=350612">Re: Re: Re: Re: Gat
+hering module usage statistics</a></td>
            <td>0</td><td align="right">2004-05-04 18:12:38</td>
          </tr>

[download]
Reloading the page fixed the immediate "problem".

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

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Re: Fluke of unformatted dates (20040504183239)
by tye (Sage) on May 05, 2004 at 04:03 UTC

    mod_perl "bug". On occasion, the regex engine doesn't work as it is supposed to and punctuation doesn't get inserted into a date. Similar bug also sometimes causes nodes to be dated as "on never".

    We also sometimes get "bizarre copy of ..." errors in the log, the XML feeds used to randomly not encode (or was it double-encode?) (we switched away from XML::Writer and that problem disappeared).

    I've seen these things enough times to strongly suspect that they happen when one of the httpd processes overwrites some part of memory it shouldn't have and so, until that process gets recycled, a certain percentage of hits will be serviced by a not-quite-as-sane-as-usual instance of the Perl interpretter.

    One day we'll try a new build of mod_perl. Based on my previous experience, the first such try will likely be less stable than what we've got now.

    - tye        

[reply]
      Running mod_perl as a DSO perhaps? I've seen stuff like that with mod_perl that went away after compiling mod_perl as a static Apache module.

      -sam

[reply]
Re: 20040504183239
by tkil (Monk) on May 05, 2004 at 03:06 UTC

    For what it's worth, I saw this in passing a few days ago as well. A reload solved the problem for me as well. I'll try to pay more attention the next time I see it.

[reply]

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