A 1.3 Nag release ?

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Folks,

> nagios-devel-admin at lists.sourceforge.net wrote:
> > Dear Folks,
> > 
> > I am keen to back port the 2.0 embedded Perl changes (to re-init the
> > Perl interpreter after 'n' checks, so that the size of the
> > Nagios binary does not grow without limit).
> >

unfortunately, it appears that a 1.2 Nag (FreeBSD 4.9/Perl 5.005/350 
active service checks) patched to re-init the interpreter (by calling 
the Perl API to deallocate and reallocate/initialise the Perl 
interpreter, in the same or similar way as for Nag 2.0a1) does _not_ 
show this affect.

In fact, the leak rate is faster - _much_ faster - than without Perl 
being re-inited.

While there's every possibility that I didn't incorporate the 2.0a1 
changes correctly - for example, an an uncaught ALRM signal caused the 
main (daemon) process to exit prematurely - it seems to me now that 
there was simply no hope of capping the memory usage of the Perl 
embedded Nag process by re-initialising the Perl interpreter (because 
Perl continues to allocate memory from the Nagios heap which grows 
accordingly. This heap memory is not returned to the OS until the 
process exits).

It seems to me now that 

1 the only way of dealing with embedded Perl leaks is periodically 
restarting the Nagios process, either by cron or by some cleverer way 
within Nagios (fork the startup script with the 'restart' parameter 
perhaps).

2 for this reason, in less there are other proven patches (such as the 
chained hash work) for 1.2, the other successfull Perl patches are not 
sufficient for another 1.x release.

Yours sincerely.

-- 
Stanley Hopcroft

Network specialist, IT Infrastructure
IP Australia
Ph: (02) 6283 3189  Fax: (02) 6281 1353
PO Box 200 Woden  ACT 2606
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au


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