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Red Hat's Perl Problem Makes Waves
By Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2008-09-12
Whoops. Although Perl's not to blame, a problem involving it has come into the spotlight. Fingers are pointing at Red Hat over a screwup that made a Perl program run about 100 times slower than a user might reasonably expect.
As reported by Neil McAllister, Vipul Ved Prakash "started tinkering with one of his company's Linux boxes. . . . To his surprise, Prakash found that the parts of his application that were eating up the most CPU involved 'bless' and 'overload' -- core Perl language functions that are used in the process of instantiating new objects."
Next, "To make a long story short, he got rid of the Perl executable that came with his CentOS installation, compiled a new one from stock source code, and the bug disappeared. Clearly, the Perl hackers are blameless in this case. The fault lies squarely with Red Hat for distributing a buggy version of the interpreter."
Red Hat's reputation is no doubt going to take a hit, as this is something that will put a lot of Red Hat customers on edge and no official fix has been released. Other users may suffer, too.
The development should at least leave Perl's reputation unquestionably in the clear, though, which is nice to see. The programming language is even getting a little publicity thanks to the issue.
About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.
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