I've just released a new version of Devel-MAT, now with the heap dumping part split out into its own distribution, Devel-MAT-Dumper.
There's two reasons for this. Firstly, by being split into its own distribution, the heap-dumper part is smaller and lighter to install on places like production servers as it needs no non-core dependencies. Since the heapdump files still need analysis somewhere, you'll still have to install the full Devel-MAT distribution on a machine - such as a workstation or laptop - but you no longer need the analysis tools on every target machine.
Secondly, since the two parts are now in independent distributions, they can have different Perl version requirements. I want to keep the ability to analyse Perl programs running on versions from 5.10 onwards (and maybe sometime see if I can push that back to 5.8), but now the distributions are split I have begun to make use of 5.14 features in some of the analysis tools. This means that you can still analyse programs running on 5.10, but you will need an installation of 5.14 or later to run the tooling.
Looking a little further afield, I plan to continue writing more tooling, perhaps published as independent distributions in places too. It's still the case that almost every time I run into some situation that needs memory analysis like this, I end up writing more tools to help, so the flow of additional tooling will continue for a while yet.
I'm also keen to hear success stories from others (or even failure ones - what couldn't you work out and what might I do to help?) to help guide the creation of more tooling. I'm available to consult with people to help you with your own problems also - send me a note to
leonerd [at] leonerd [dot] org [dot] uk
and we can discuss your requirements.
