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?

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

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

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.