Cleaning Up on Edit from Perl

[Stas Bekman]

Scott Penrose wrote:
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> 
> 
> On Wednesday, Jun 11, 2003, at 09:39 Australia/Melbourne, Stas Bekman  
> wrote:
> 
>> The mod_perl guide comes to help:
>> http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/ 
>> troubleshooting.html#_warn__child_process_30388_did_not_exit__sending_a 
>> nother_SIGHUP
>>
>> PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL=-1 perl my_heavy_destruct_program
> 
> 
> On exploring this further I have discovered that this only works for  
> mod_perl....
> 
>  From perlhack
> 
>> if you want to run any of the tests yourself manually using the  
>> pureperl or perl.third executables, please note that by default perl  
>> does not explicitly cleanup all the memory it has allocated (such as  
>> global memory arenas) but instead lets the exit() of the whole 
>> program  "take care" of such allocations, also known as "global 
>> destruction of  objects".
>>
>> There is a way to tell perl to do complete cleanup: set the  
>> environment variable PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL to a non-zero value. The  
>> t/TEST wrapper does set this to 2, and this is what you need to do  
>> too, if you don't want to see the "global leaks": For example, for  
>> "third-degreed" Perl:
>> (Note: the mod_perl apache module uses also this environment variable  
>> for its own purposes and extended its semantics. Refer to the 
>> mod_perl  documentation for more information.)
> 
> 
> Note the last part - It seems that mod_perl has extended to support the  
> - -1.
> 
> For now I am going with the following approach.
> 
>     kill 9, $$;

Indeed. perlhack.pod says:

=head2 PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL

If you want to run any of the tests yourself manually using the
pureperl or perl.third executables, please note that by default
perl B<does not> explicitly cleanup all the memory it has allocated
(such as global memory arenas) but instead lets the exit() of
the whole program "take care" of such allocations, also known
as "global destruction of objects".

There is a way to tell perl to do complete cleanup: set the
environment variable PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL to a non-zero value.
The t/TEST wrapper does set this to 2, and this is what you
need to do too, if you don't want to see the "global leaks":
For example, for "third-degreed" Perl:

	env PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL=2 ./perl.third -Ilib t/foo/bar.t

(Note: the mod_perl apache module uses also this environment variable
for its own purposes and extended its semantics. Refer to the mod_perl
documentation for more information. Also, spawned threads do the
equivalent of setting this variable to the value 1.)

If, at the end of a run you get the message I<N scalars leaked>, you can
recompile with C<-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS>, which will cause
the addresses of all those leaked SVs to be dumped; it also converts
C<new_SV()> from a macro into a real function, so you can use your
favourite debugger to discover where those pesky SVs were allocated.


__________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman            JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker
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