Dev::Blog

Filed under “whoops”:

I wanted to look for a resource leak in one of my apps, but didn’t want to bother installing (and learning) some load test utility (which I really need to do, but not this morning). I made a quickie perl script:

NOTE: there should be semicolons after the system calls, but WordPress is returning error 503 if I do that. I’ll have to look into it later (between the “no image uploads from ecto” bug in 2.0.1 and this error in (I’m guessing) 2.0.2, I’m really loving WP right now…)

while($counter++ < 50000)
{
print $counter . “\n”;
system(”curl http://url.com > /dev/null”)
}

Unfortunately, my URL had parameters:

while($counter++ < 50000)
{
print $counter . “\n”;
system(”curl http://url.com&x=5 > /dev/null”)
}

It only took a second after I ran it to realize that I’d just spawned hundreds (growing into thousands) of requests with the ampersand being interpreted as “run in the background,” which was good for load I suppose, but not good for a lot of other things.

Proper code:

while($counter++ < 50000)
{
print $counter . “\n”;
system(”curl http://url.com\\&x=5 > /dev/null”)
}

And yes, my first run only had a single backslash, which was ignored as an invalid escape sequence. Urgh.

Now if I could just recreate the leak…

Technorati Tags: Perl, Testing, Skype