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 __________________________________________________