Sticky pnotes with Apache::Registry

[John Heitmann]

Hello,

I am seeing an issue where it appears that the contents of pnotes does not get destroyed when code is run inside of Apache::Registry. I first noticed this when I saw that connections to our db remained open after a request was finished (we store the dbi handle in pnotes for inter-request caching). Are there times when pnotes is expected not to be destroyed? This same example works correctly when placed in a method handler.

I'm running perl 5.8, mod_perl 1.27, Apache 1.3.27, and a stock RedHat Linux 7.3 install on a vanilla x86 desktop.

Here is a really simple snippet that shows the "problem" (I just may not understand how pnotes works).

my $r = Apache->request();
my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=blah blah blah...");
$r->pnotes("our_dbh_cache" => $dbh);

# Test destruction with a simpler case also
my $lemming = Lemming->new();
$r->pnotes("lemming" => $lemming);
$r->pnotes("lemming" => undef) if 0; #if 1 then destroy is never called

$r->send_http_header();
$r->print("Hello");

package Lemming;
sub new {
my $class = shift;
return bless {}, $class
}

sub DESTROY {
warn ("Aieee!!!");
}
1;

If the "if 0" is changed to "if 1" then it works as I expect and "Aieee!!!" is dumped to the error log at the end of the request. If it is run as written, then under Apache::Registry Lemming::DESTROY is never called and the db connection sticks around indefinitely.

I can work around this particular instance of the problem pretty easily. We can use Apache::DBI and we will only ever have one connection sticking around (as it is now there is a connection per request which is pretty awful), or we could just not cache the dbh. That example is from old code and we don't care about it too much. The real reason I'm mailing this list is that I'm seeing problems elsewhere in our full system built with method handlers rather than Apache::Registry. In that system data stored in pnotes may also be leaking. I haven't been able to fully nail down those larger problems enough yet to include any more detail, but I'm hoping this small example will shed light on the larger issue.

Thanks for any help,

John