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