Thanks for your explanation and quick response, however with -Uusemymalloc it segfaults almost when it starts. At least it showed that the problem comes from that way, probably the mymalloc is worse than the OpenBSD one. :P
We found what appears to be a workaround on awstats. Changing $tokenquery=$1||''; to $tokenquery='?'; after we traced what was awstats running when segfaulting. It's on awstats.pl line 6574 ----- awstats 6.7 (build 1.892) (c) 2000-2007 Laurent Destailleur ----- It runs perfect and we didnt find any problem, but we don't have a clue as to why that is... We are still looking for a real solution Thanks again, Alejandro. mickey wrote: > On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 05:25:32PM -0300, Alejandro Lozanoff wrote: > >> Hello list, >> > > re > > >> We recently updated a 3.7 machine running awstat(perl) to parse all our >> websites logs with the biggest being around 1GB. >> When parsing the big log it randomly segfaults on 4.1, 3.9 and 3.8, we >> tried new clean release installs and it still segfaults. On 3.7 it works >> flawlessly, on 3.8 which has the same perl version as 3.7 (5.8.6) it >> still segfaults. The problem is completely random but it tends to happen >> after its been running for a while as it doesnt happen on small logs (or >> the probability for it to happen on those files is too low ) >> >> As the trace below (from the perl.core) shows, it's an out of bounds >> problem, then we remember about a change on 3.8: >> >> "malloc(3) has been rewritten to use the mmap(2) system call, >> introducing unpredictable allocation addresses and guard pages, which >> helps in detecting heap based buffer overflows and prevents various >> types of attacks." >> > > yes. this increases memory fragmentation immensly resulting > in (practically) less virtual space available for data. > as an increased penalty (200-300%) for cpu consuption > on processes w/ lots (20M and more) malloc(3)ed memory... > as well increased demand for the physical memory that > on the overcommiting nature of it you perhaps observe. > a way around it is only to use perl malloc (sbrk-based) > > cu
