Embedded Perl status report and request for Testers

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Folks,

I am writing with a report about the embedded Perl support in Nagios 
2.x.

Nagios 2.x introduced substantial changes in the way Nagios interacted 
with Perl. While these changes were beneficial, because they were 
developed on an older unthreaded Perl, they were checked in without 
adequate testing.

As a result, the embedded Perl support in Nagios 2.0b1-b3 has suffered 
from a bad memory leak with contemporary threaded Perls. As you can see 
from the results below (1), the leak rate is excessive and requires that 
the process size of Nag be monitored and Nagios restarted if the vsz is 
over threshold.

Recently (since last Fri 22 Apr) extensive changes to 

- the Nagios Perl API (in checks.c and utils.c)

- Perl initialisation

- the embedded Perl driver (p1.pl)

show promising indications (2).

I welcome those that are willing to test the changes (patches against 
2.0b3) and report their findings.

If you are interested please mail me privately and I will send you the 
patches (sorry, I can't publish them). 

Please note that the patches introduce an incompatability with former 
versions of p1.pl: you must use this p1.pl with the patched Nag and 
likewise you cannot use this p1.pl with older Nag (2.0b1-b3 unpatched).

The results are not great (the reason for the leak remains unknown to 
me) but I am much happier with this than with the former code.

It has been in use here (50-55 custom Perl plugins, ~400 active service 
checks, small dedicated Nagios host) for a few days - more than long 
enough to show signs of the extreme leak rate.


Yours sincerely.


Notes 

Comparison of leak rates for embedded Perl Nagios, same host/configs, 
before and after current patches.

1 vsz sizes (kB) for Nagios 2.0b1 - 2.0b3 (unpatched) and old p1.pl

                vsz

04/20/05 00:00,18240
04/20/05 01:00,18436
04/20/05 02:00,18636
04/20/05 03:00,18784
04/20/05 04:00,18924
04/20/05 05:00,19220
04/20/05 06:00,19396
04/20/05 07:00,19424
04/20/05 08:00,19792
04/20/05 09:00,20480
04/20/05 10:00,20836
04/20/05 11:00,21168
04/20/05 12:00,21280
04/20/05 13:00,21768
04/20/05 14:00,21872
04/20/05 15:00,22384
04/20/05 16:00,22460
04/20/05 17:00,22528
04/20/05 18:00,22836
04/20/05 19:00,23144
04/20/05 20:00,23164
04/20/05 21:00,23572
04/20/05 22:00,23952

2 vsz sizes for patched 2.0b3 and new p1.pl

04/22/05 21:00,17616
04/22/05 22:00,17624
04/22/05 23:00,17640
04/23/05 00:00,17648
04/23/05 01:00,17672
04/23/05 02:00,17680
04/23/05 03:00,17696
04/23/05 04:00,17704
04/23/05 05:00,17720
04/23/05 06:00,17728
04/23/05 07:00,17736
04/23/05 08:00,17752
04/23/05 09:00,17760
04/23/05 10:00,17784
04/23/05 11:00,17792
04/23/05 12:00,17896
04/23/05 13:00,17912
04/23/05 14:00,17928
04/23/05 15:00,17936
04/23/05 16:00,17952
04/23/05 17:00,17968
04/23/05 18:00,17968
04/23/05 19:00,17968
04/23/05 20:00,17968
04/23/05 20:40,17968
04/23/05 22:00,17968
04/23/05 23:00,17968
04/24/05 00:00,17968
04/24/05 01:00,17976
04/24/05 02:00,17992
04/24/05 03:00,18000
04/24/05 04:00,18016
04/24/05 05:00,18024
04/24/05 06:00,18032
04/24/05 07:00,18048
04/24/05 08:00,18056
04/24/05 09:00,18072
04/24/05 10:00,18088
04/24/05 11:00,18096
04/24/05 12:00,18112
04/24/05 13:00,18128
04/24/05 14:00,18252
04/24/05 15:00,18152
04/24/05 16:00,18168
04/24/05 17:00,18184
04/24/05 18:00,18192
04/24/05 19:00,18208
04/24/05 20:00,18224
04/24/05 21:00,18232
04/24/05 22:00,18248
04/24/05 23:00,18256
04/25/05 00:00,18272
04/25/05 01:00,18280
04/25/05 02:00,18296
04/25/05 03:00,18304
04/25/05 04:00,18320
04/25/05 05:00,18328
04/25/05 06:00,18344
04/25/05 07:00,18384
04/25/05 08:00,18540
04/25/05 09:00,18988
04/25/05 10:00,19076
04/25/05 11:00,19108
04/25/05 12:00,19124
04/25/05 13:00,19140
04/25/05 14:00,19156
04/25/05 15:00,19172
04/25/05 16:00,19188
04/25/05 17:00,19204
04/25/05 18:00,19220
04/25/05 19:00,19228

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