So a panic is a panic, right? Well yes in that is stops your server dead in its tracks, but the how you deal with it is the important thing. I’ve been frustrated for a long time with Linux and FreeBSD (Linux more so) regarding the lack of good post-mortem crash analysis facilities.
Some background might be helpful here. One of the clusters that my company administrates has 10 FreeBSD 5.
There's Perl... then there's perl.
Perl seems like a very expressive, arguably elegant, extremely powerful language on the surface. In fact it is. However, under the hood it's down-right scary. man perlguts, perlembed, perlapi, perlxs, perliol just for starters.
For people embedding perl in other apps, or writing perl extensions in C, things get hair quick. Perl's internals don't have the benefit of an advanced garbage collector (like some other interpretted languages).
