Yesterday evening, a friend of mine had some issues with installing DBD::mysql, and asked if I had encountered the same issue. The problem, as the output from make test showed, was that certain symbols was missing:

#     Tried to use 'DBD::mysql'.
#     Error:  Can't load '/Users/westerlund/src/perl/DBD-mysql-4.008/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle' for module DBD::mysql: dlopen(/Users/westerlund/src/perl/DBD-mysql-4.008/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle, 2): Symbol not found: _is_prefix

Fair enough, this is related to a 64-bit issue with MySQL—at least with my Perl version, which is now:

Summary of my perl5 (revision 5 version 10 subversion 0) configuration:
  Platform:
    osname=darwin, osvers=9.5.0, archname=darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level

If you try to link to a x86_64 version of MySQL, then you get the above mentioned error. So, I downloaded an x86 version of MySQL and tried again. The …

Hello my dear readers.

Today I have a question for all of you. What platforms (32bit or 64 bit) do you use for your servers with more than 4Gb RAM? I’m asking because recently we‘ve hit few really weird bugs in Linux kernels 2.6.18 to 2.6.22 and all those bugs were PAE-related. Now I’d really love to move all machines to 64-bit, but I’m in doubt because we don’t know too much about Rails stack (ruby, mongrel, haproxy) on 64-bit platforms (all our DB boxes are 64-bit of course).

So, please drop me a line if you have any experience (negative or positive) with Rails platform on 64-bit machines. I’d really appreciate your help.