On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Russell D. Weiss wrote:
> I'm using Apache::Session within a large Web application (consisting of many
> scripts). We also have multiple developers on this project, some of whom
> are junior developers with only a bit of mod_perl experience.
>
> In any case, I've written a custom session package that wraps to
> Apache::Session. It uses Apache::Session for persistence, but it adds nice
> functionality to it (cookies, session time-out, etc.).
>
> Normally, this works great. No problem at all. This object goes out of
> scope at the end of the script (it's scoped lexically with "my"). It also
> goes out of scope when "die" is explicitly called. If I add "die 'Blah blah
> blah'" to an app, things are fun. BUT... sometimes when there's a syntax
> error in the code, this object just stays in scope. This causes a real
> problem, because then the developer will just re-load. The process will sit
> there forever, waiting for the session lock to go away. But it never
> does...
My advice would be to eliminate the syntax errors in your
code. Apache::Session wasn't designed with the goal of working around
other people's erroneous code!
>
> This is a problem. Under certain strange circumstances, the object does not
> go out of scope. Even under PerlRun (which I *thought* would clear the
> application's namespace at the end of execution), the object stays in scope
> (I print to STDERR in DESTROY to see this).
There are some bugs in Perl 5.005_03 which sometimes cause adverse
interactions between eval and die. One symptom seems to be that lexical
objects become immortal. This is pretty rare, though.
Can you try Perl 5.6?
> The mod_perl server starts going crazy spawning off new threads for each
> request, because current threads are busy. I placed some limits on this in
> httpd.conf, but this is not really a solution. The only solution is to
> restart the server... But there's gotta be a better way!
>
> This has been plaguing us for a while, and I can't figure it out. I was
> considering writing a $SIG{__DIE__} handler that would take this object out
> of scope, but I ran into other issues there. Has anyone else run into this
> problem?
-jwb
