Given the PID, there are three ways to find out where the server is hanging:

  • Deploy the Perl calls-tracing mechanism. This will allow you to spot the location of the Perl code that triggers the problem.

  • Use a system calls-tracing utility such as strace. This approach reveals low-level details about the misbehavior of some part of the system.

  • Use an interactive debugger such as gdb. When the process is stuck and you don't know what it was doing just before it got stuck, using gdb you can attach to this process and print its call stack, to reveal where the last call originated. Just like with strace, you see the C function call trace, not the Perl high-level function calls.