A patched perl from RedHat is in the fastbugs area.

 From their announcement:
"These updated packages fix a large performance degradation. This issue was
most noticeable when using "bless" and "overload" combinations, as well as
when using the Perl DBI modules."

Our fastbugs area is at

ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/5x/i386/updates/fastbugs/
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/5x/x86_64/updates/fastbugs/

Troy

Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> This just in:
> 
> 
> 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
> 


-- 
__________________________________________________
Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LCSI/CSI DSS Group
__________________________________________________