"Stephen Clouse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Under [mod_perl 2 and perl 5.10 on Fedora 9] I am getting some of the > most bizarre and insidious perl core errors I've ever seen in my 15 > years of using perl. > > Attempt to free unreferenced scalar: SV 0xbd266be4, Perl interpreter: > 0xba01c410 at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.0/HTML/Mason/Component.pm > line > 147. > panic: attempt to copy value 20 to a freed scalar bd49dffc > Use of freed value in iteration > panic: free from wrong pool > > Not to mention countless application errors involving dereferencing.
Dereferencing demons, eh? Your error rang a bell with me. But it wasn't until I saw List/Util/Util.so in your follow-up post that I remembered, List::Util did that same scary crashing thing to me a while back while I was debugging krang (which is mod_perl 1.3x-based). It boiled down to the (IMO) senseless and unnecessary use of weak referrences somewhere deep in the dark bowels of the Scalar-List-Utils package. I'd read somewhere that weak references were not all that stable in certain recent versions of perl, so when I saw all the weakening being done in there (and all the XS bugs the module has had to fix, in its change log: http://search.cpan.org/src/GBARR/Scalar-List-Utils-1.19/Changes At the time, upgrading the module to the latest release didn't stop my big scary memory reference errors. So I read through the code that used the module and was astonished at why the module was being used: the *one* line of code in the entire module that I was troubleshooting that *depended* on List::Util was a single, simple call to its exported method: first() What does first() do? It invokes kilobytes of fast, compiled XS code to ...huh? Return to me the first element in a list I pass to it that returns true for a code block I pass to it? Yup. Like this: # from the POD doco at # http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/Scalar-List-Utils-1.19/lib/List/Util.pm#DESCRIPTION $foo = first { defined($_) } @list; # first defined value in @list Who needs to install a CPAN module to do that? I personally would have written it as: $foo = (grep defined, @list)[0]; # first defined value in @list But thats kind of non-obvious to the programmer who finds it later (if they dont read the comment, that is). You could also simply replace "first" with "grep" (and a pair of parens) and get the same effect: ($foo) = grep { defined($_) } @list; # first defined value in @list (at the cost of one extra byte and some wasted cpu cycles if the compiler doesn't notice that the lvalue is a list of length one, and lets grep process the whole list anyway, even after it finds and assigns a defined element in there). IMO, even this would be better than loading List::Utils and calling first(): my $foo; for (@list) { next unless defined($_); $foo = $_; last; } So I fixed my bug by writing a line or two of perl to in order to remove one call to the List::Util module's first() function. > My problem is that I don't even know where or how to start tracing or > debugging such an issue to determine precisely what is scribbling on > perl's > memory. Starting from your error message (line 147 of HTML::Mason::Component) it appears HTML::Mason is calling a "dynamic method" method (one named in a variable). No help there. Okay, what else is HTML::Mason::Component using? What libraries has it loaded? Is List::Utils being used? This looked suspicious to me: use HTML::Mason::Tools qw(absolute_comp_path can_weaken); Just because you "can_weaken" a reference, does that mean you should? Sure enough HTML::Mason::Tools loads Scalar::Util apparently to do some reference weakening. I'd check my Mason component for use of the functions that the Scalar-List-Utils modules provide: List::Util first max maxstr min minstr reduce shuffle sum Scalar::Util blessed dualvar isweak readonly refaddr reftype tainted weaken isvstring looks_like_number set_prototype And see if rewriting these in pure perl helps. Also, if it does, but would require changing code that you'd rather not monkey with, it looks like there is a pure-perl version of the module that can be installed by passing a -pm option to Makefile.PL: perl Makefile.PL -pm make make test make install Anyway, I hope somehow, some of this helps! -dave