Strange apache behaviour when lauching an external binary called by a perl script - apache

Question

I am currently setting up a web service powered by apache and running on CENTOS 6.4.
This service uses perl scripts (cgi-bin) launching in particular external homemade fortran compiled binaries.
Here is the issue: when I boot my server, everything goes well except that one of my binary crashes systematically (with a kernel segfault) when called by my perl scripts.
If I restart manually the httpd service (at the command line: service httpd restart), the issue is totally fixed.
I examined apache/system logs and nothing suspicious can be found.
It appears that the problem occurs only when httpd is launched by /etc/rc[0-6].d startup directives. I tried to change the launch order of http (S85httpd by default) to any other position without success.
To summarize, my web service is only functional (with no external binary crash) when httpd is launched at the command line once the server has fully booted up!
[EDIT] This issue is now resolved:
My fortran binary handles very large arrays and complex functions requiring an unlimited stack size.
Despite that the stack size limit was defined on a system-wide basis (in /etc/security/limits.conf), for any reason it appears that the "apache/perl/fortran binary" ensemble was not aware of that (causing my binary to crash each time it was called).
At the contrary, when I manually restarted apache at the shell prompt, the stacksize limit was correctly passed (.bashrc with 'ulimit -S -s unlimited').
As a workaround, I used BSD::Resource module (http://metacpan.org/pod/BSD::Resource) to define stacksize directly in my perl script by using e.g. setrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK, $softlimit, $hardlimit);
Thus, this new stack size limit is now directly passed from my perl script to my binary.

Answer 1

I've run into similar problems before. Maybe one way to solve this is to put the binary on a 'delayed start', so that it starts after everything else on your system is running. One way to do this is to put an at job in your /etc/rc.local script, to start the binary in X minutes.