mirror/perl, new package, consumes all memory (woody)

[Jameson Burt <jameson@monumental.com>]

After running woody for 4 months, I once again upgraded woody,
this time getting the mirror package 2.9-24,
getting perl 5.6.0-20 on which mirror runs, 
and getting about 300 other upgraded packages.
Unfortunately, after this upgrade, mirror consumes all memory and swap 
space,
filling up my 128MB memory and 256MB swap space.
Downgrading back to last year's potato mirror,
version 2.9-15, this memory consumption reoccurs,
so perl 5.6.0-20 might be causing mirror to consume all memory.

I have run mirror nightly under Debian Linux since 1996,
and have never had "mirror" consume all memory.
Free shows the following total memory consumption while mirroring,
             total       used       free shared buffers cached
Mem:        125904     124464       1440      0     340  10684
-/+ buffers/cache:     113440      12464
Swap:       256968     256740        228

When killing mirror, it dies with the perhaps unimportant message,
 Out of memory!
 Socket:/usr/lib/perl5/Socket.pm:256 Caught a SIGSEGV shutting down at  
/usr/bin/mirror line 3973.
 main:/usr/bin/mirror:3974 Caught a SIGTERM shutting down at 
/usr/bin/mirror line 3973.
 Attempt to free unreferenced scalar at /usr/bin/mirror line 3974.
 Attempt to free unreferenced scalar at /usr/bin/mirror line 3974.
 Attempt to free unreferenced scalar at /usr/bin/mirror line 3974.


Because mirror consumes all my memory, cursor movements respond in 30 
seconds,
and "ps -auxw" takes 8 minutes.
For my single mirror of Debian Linux, mirror demanded all memory
for 10 hours, and never contacted the Debian mirror site,
so I finally killed the mirror process.
In the past, mirror would burden my computer for but perhaps 3 minutes,
then connect to Debian's mirror site.

Before and after my 2-month upgrade on woody,
I have used the same mirror configuration file, independent of the 
mirror package, so for that same file, mirror.defaults, I nightly run,
   mirror -p debian  /usr/local/mirror/mirror-defaults
I get the same total consumption of all memory if I mirror the
small file structure in Debian non-us for which I would type,
   mirror -p debian-non-us  /usr/local/mirror/mirror-defaults

I conclude that perl 5.6 alters how mirror works,
consuming all memory.
I suppose that "mirror" must be altered to accomodate this new perl 5.6.

---Jameson C. Burt