Why does Apache complain that CGI.pm has panicked at line 4001 due to a memory wrap?

This error according to the logs is caused by a 5-year old Perl script that merely grabs data from MySQL via a simp开发者_如何学Gole SQL select and displays it.

It's running on my dev machine which is MBP with 8GB of RAM running the stock Apache.

Once a while, once or twice a month, I get the following error for no apparent reason :

panic: memory wrap at /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/CGI.pm line 4001.

Apache refuses to run the script again and only a reboot of the OS would make Apache relent. The OS says that there's 3+ GB of free memory when it happens so it's not a low memory issue. Luckily this doesn't happen on the production Debian 5 server.

What's a memory wrap? And what causes it?

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I hit this bug as well in a slightly different circumstance. PerlMonks, as ever, has just saved me probably days of work:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=823389

the problem lies in the way osx ties up other resources. a simple sleep will give the os time to close and open. restart or graceful will go in conflict.

apachectl stop
sleep 2
apachectl start

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This is late but the perl distributed by MacPorts does not have this problem, if that is an option.

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mu is too short's answer, which as unfortunately posted as a comment. :

perldiag says that "panic: memory wrap" means "Something tried to allocate more memory than possible". A bit of googling suggests that this isn't a CGI.pm problem but an occassional problem with Perl 5.10 and OSX.