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

I have upgraded my site from 5.10.0 to 5.10.1 and now I get randomly occurring errors. The error messages do not correlate to the code and the errors are not consistent in that most of the time the functions work without any errors. I can test the same function several times and it will error some of the time but not all of the time. Is there any method I can use to trace this kind of behaviour? Just reading the code doesn't help because the code was working before the upgrade so the logic is all correct. Tracing the error messages doesn't help because they are calling code that is not even being used when the error occurs. The errors are pointing to the file that the code is accessing but not to the correct location.
  • Comment on Random errors after upgrading 5.10.0 to 5.10.1

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Random errors after upgrading 5.10.0 to 5.10.1
by kcott (Archbishop) on Oct 11, 2012 at 23:10 UTC

    G'day boosth,

    Welcome to the monastery.

    Without seeing any code, input, actual output, expected output or error messages, it's not possible to advise you what's causing your problems.

    perl5101delta describes the differences between Perl v5.10.0 and Perl v5.10.1 - a number of these differences are listed under Incompatible Changes.

    Also, it's possible that modules you are using need to be recompiled for the new Perl version.

    While your logic may not have changed, how that logic is implemented under the hood may well be different.

    To get a better answer, you'll need to provide more information. Guidelines for doing this can be found in: How do I post a question effectively?

    -- Ken

[reply]
      Thanks for those tips. The main problem is that the code works most of the time. I don't understand how it would be possible to work most of the time if there were actual problems with the syntax or module incompatibility. I thought it might be related to load but I have been monitoring the server load and the errors do not correlate with that either. I'm a bit lost as to how to actually fix this as I have around 200k lines of code to go through. The site is running on debian squeeze and is in production. I can fix incompatibilty issues if they are logical but random inconsistent errors that don't correlate is pretty tough.
[reply]

        I don't understand how it would be possible to work most of the time if there were actual problems with the syntax or module incompatibility.

        Do you know what a pointer is? This is how "random errors" happen, some pointer points to the wrong memory, and then there is a crash or .... 5.10 is known buggy, modules compiled for 5.10 could still be vulnerable. If you installed 5.10.1 over 5.10, upgrade all the modules

[reply]
Re: Random errors after upgrading 5.10.0 to 5.10.1
by Kenosis (Priest) on Oct 11, 2012 at 23:06 UTC

    Do you have any code and error messages that you can share?

    Edit: Added "code and"

[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom