LWP::Simple::get gets slower and slower

[Mathieu Longtin <da...@mindspring.com>]

I have noticed something extremely baffling.

We use the get() function of LWP::Simple within mod_perl scripts, and it
seems for long running servers, it gets slower and slower.

I have two servers here that would consistently take 8 seconds to process a
get() call, when getting the same URL using the "GET" command would take
about a second (very fast remote server).

And the extra 8 second would show up for pretty much any URL regardless of
the script.

The really baffling part is that doing a soft restart of apache (apachectl
restart) did not take care of the problem, but doing a hard restart
(apachectl stop && apachectl start) will make the performance go back to
normal.

I don't know how long a server has to run in order for this issue to
surface, it might be months, since we only noticed this lately and we don't
typically hard restart production servers on a regular basis.

Anybody else noticed something like this?

-Mathieu