# High Resolution Timer Warnings

There has been a recent problem identified when running collectl on systems with versions of the Time:HiRes perl module less than 1.91 and versions of glibc newer then 2.3. So far these messages appear to be harmless as they've only been identified as occurring during system boot. However, since the problem is that HiRes is actually calling the setitimer system service incorrectly, it is really living on borrowed time (if you'll pardon the pun) and users would be much better off and safer to simply upgrade to a newer version which they can get at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Time-HiRes/.

If you've never installed something from CPAN before you shouldn't be intimidated even if you're not a programmer as all you need to do is perform the following steps. If the version you're downloading is not 1.9715, replace that string in the instructions below with the appropriate version number:

- download Time-HiRes-1.9715.tar.gz to /tmp
- cd /tmp
- unpack it with the command tar -zxf Time-HiRes-1.9715.tar.gz
- cd Time-HiRes-1.9715
- perl Makefile.PL
- make
- make test
- make install
- collectl -v should identify the newer version

In a few cases, rather than replacing the older version the new one ends up in a different location, and collectl still sees the old version. You can usually get around this problem by re-executing the make install command as make install -UNINST=1

Update - April 08, 2009
It looks like RedHat has finally responded to my bugzilla and posted a solution, which makes me optimistic we should see a newer version of Time::HiRes in the RHEL5.4 timeframe. That still doesn't mean the problem has been resolved on distros that use older versions.

updated April 8, 2009