Re^2: Fetching Madness

Success on two fronts! The systems people discovered that the problem was due to a change in the firewall code. Something to do with deep packet inspection and differing buffer sizes.

I had already gotten far enough along with the Sys::SigAction testing to find that it does work. I was about to post some code but it is practically verbatim to the examples in the link included in my first post above. I'm going to implement Sys:SigAction in my programs from now on to prevent the occurrence of perpetual hangs.

[Marshall]

Fantastic! I did some looking at this also. The problem is with deferred action on some signals and appears to be Perl version specific., eg Perl 5.8.2 will work differently than 5.8.0 and Perl 5.8.0 is different than Perl 5.6.x. The POSIX way >=Perl 5.8.2 is much better than the 5.6 way since you can do something other than just "blow up". There appears to be a way to "have your cake and eat it too" on more recent versions of Perl (apparently you can set the "safe" flag so that Perl checks ALRM often enough that the program won't hang). On the other hand, "blow up" is often the correct answer to something like "cannot connect to the DB".

Anyway programming is often pragmatic and you have do just do what works! If that means reverting to 5.6 style signal handling to cover all versions of Perl you work with, so be it!