Hi all, Our website is experiencing some very weird behavior that we don't know how to resolve. I have some avenues on which to do the next steps of investigation, but I'm really hoping that the mod_perl/Mason illuminati can shed some light on this.
The basic problem: some requests just totally vanish. No record appears of them in the apache log, and no response is returned to the browser. We were running apache 1.3.31 with mod_perl 1.29 as a DSO. When the problem occurred, we'd get a segfault. This looked a lot like Mason bug #546, so we changed to apache 1.3.33 statically linked with mod_perl 1.29. We don't get segfaults here, but some requests really do just vanish. Some added information: We're using "MasonAllowGlobals" for a handful of variables, and we do have <%shared> sections. The page being loaded is one of our largest pages, sometimes growing as large as 800k bytes. The OS is a cobbled-together RedHat/CentOS/manually installed stuff system. Kernel is 2.4-something. A lot of the code is legacy stuff on which 'use strict' and warnings have never been used. Some of my planned investigation includes using "PerlWarn On" for an httpd -X on our development server, with great hopes that something obvious will jump out. We've taken some immediate remedial measures, such as making the page a little bit smaller. However, that seems like a band-aid that's only covering up some deeper problem. I'd really like to figure this out; it's becoming very frustrating. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated. If it's something that a few hours of expert-level analysis could help to resolve, I'd be glad to hear proposals from principals only. Reply directly to me, and include your rate, why you're the person best suited to solve this problem, and a general outline of what you're planning to do. Thanks in advance!
