CentOS - Aug 2008 - slow Perl on CentOS 5

If your Perl apps are unusually slow on CentOS 5, have a look at this blog:

http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/

In a nutshell: some Perl apps are 100x slower on RedHat / CentOS 5 
compared to other distributions.

Bugzilla entry:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=379791

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 1:30 PM, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org>
wrote:
> If your Perl apps are unusually slow on CentOS 5, have a look at this blog:
>
> http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/
>
> In a nutshell: some Perl apps are 100x slower on RedHat / CentOS 5 compared
> to other distributions.
>
> Bugzilla entry:
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=379791
> --
> Florin Andrei
Just forwarding a posting on the Scientifix Linux mailing list that is
addressing the same perl issue and calling for collaborative effort
with CentOS.

Akemi

======= forwarded message ======Date:         Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:58:40 -0700
Sender:       Mailling list for Scientific Linux users worldwide
From:         Keith Lofstrom
Subject:      Horribly Broken RHEL5/SL5 Perl
Comments: To: Scientific Linux

This just in: http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/

Summary: The Upstream Vendor version of Perl has a patch to the
"bless[]" function that makes it /extremely/ slow. Most of us do not
write that kind of of fancy Perl, but a lot of us use one of the 1500+
CPAN modules that do. The slowdown can be over 100x with some
programs. This affects Fedora 9 as well as the various version 5
distros. TUV-patched Perl version 5.8.8 also breaks the Math::GSL
package that I wrote about a few days ago. It runs fine with 5.10 .
What to do? Some people are downloading and recompiling Perl;
we have version 5.8.8, while version 5.10 is available . A few are
abandoning Perl. A few are abandoning TUV-inspired distros. A few
are buying way more hardware than they would otherwise need.
Since some of the scientific community (especially the life sciences)
are running huge amounts of Perl, this is probably a Big Deal. We
should explore the problem further with TUV and the CentOS
community. If a fix is not forthcoming from TUV, I reluctantly suggest
that we get together with the CentOS people and fork this portion of
 the distro, perhaps standardizing on Perl 5.10 . There are people
in the Perl community ready to assist us.

Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom [log in to unmask] Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in
Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs

hello All,


--- On Mon, 8/25/08, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org> wrote:
> From: Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org>
> Subject: [CentOS] slow Perl on CentOS 5
> To: "CentOS mailing list" <centos at centos.org>
> Date: Monday, August 25, 2008, 1:30 PM
> If your Perl apps are unusually slow on CentOS 5, have a
> look at this blog:
> 
> http://blog.vipul.net/2008/08/24/redhat-perl-what-a-tragedy/
> 
> In a nutshell: some Perl apps are 100x slower on RedHat /
> CentOS 5 
> compared to other distributions.
> 
> Bugzilla entry:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=379791
> 
ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/8/SRPMS/perl-5.8.8-40.fc8.src.rpm

Using the above SRPM, I've updated perl on 2 LAMP boxes, i386 and multi-lib
x86_64.

The bless/overload bug is absent and perl is improved overall, especially any
CPAN test code that uses the Test-Harness. I'm seeing approx. 25% speed
increase in all the test suites.

In case anyone else is looking for a quick solution to the bug in 5.8.8-10, I
believe this is a good approach.

The only gotcha is that the Fedora perl suite uses a separate perl-CPAN, while
the RH suite includes it in core perl.

-- 
Mark