PHP5 Stability issues?

**NSpam** · Jul 17 '05, 11:51 AM

Re: PHP5 Stability issues?

Daniel Andersen wrote:[color=blue]
> Hey,
>
> We are in the process of rewriting our internal management system (which was
> written in PHP4), and figured this would be a good time to migrate to PHP5
> to get all the OO goodness it has to offer :) I am running php 5.0.3 on
> apache 1.3.something under slackware linux.
>
> Unfortunately I frequently get segfaults from php scripts, and they are not
> even scripts that do anything fancy or special. For example, in one script
> i got a segfault just in the middle of a HTML comment, which seems to make
> no sense whatsoever (unless hte crash came later and it hadn't gotten round
> to sending the rest of the output yet.. but whatever the case if i removed
> the html comment the code started working again). Another crash occurs when
> i assign a value to a variable, not any kind of special variable, just
> assigning a string value to a variable, and php5 segfaults.
>
> Naturally this makes very very unhappy as I very much want to move the new
> system to php5, because it looks like a much better language otherwise :)
> Has anyone else experienced problems like this? And more importantly, does
> anyone know how to get around these problems?
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel[/color]
Well for what its worth I've been through the same grief. The new object
functionality in 5 is great, but i've ended up going back to 4 sources.
I don't think its an intrinsic problem with 5, rather the underlying
libraries and O/s that PHP piggybacks onto.

Most of the problems appear to be related to non thread safe libraries,
which is not a PHP issue. If one doesn't use an O/s that uses threads
then 5 doesn't have a problem. PHP 5 + threaded O/s = a potential
problem. Like all thread problems they are a real pain to diagnose.

Rumour has it that setting up Apache to use mpm modules thus avoiding
threading issues fixes any problems. Essentially, PHP of any description
ain't thread safe.

Chris

**Joshua Beall** · Jul 17 '05, 11:52 AM

Re: PHP5 Stability issues?

What software stack are you using? I have been running PHP5 on a Linux 2.4
kernel, and Apache for the webserver for several months in a production
environment. No problems, and I have some pretty "demanding" (i.e., non
trivial code dealing with very large objects, DOM, 3+ levels of inheritance,
and some *very* large strings variables) code. Never had a single problem
that wasn't my fault (e.g., did something dumb and ate too much system
memory with a script, etc.)

**NSpam** · Jul 17 '05, 11:53 AM

Re: PHP5 Stability issues?

Joshua Beall wrote:[color=blue]
> What software stack are you using? I have been running PHP5 on a Linux 2.4
> kernel, and Apache for the webserver for several months in a production
> environment. No problems, and I have some pretty "demanding" (i.e., non
> trivial code dealing with very large objects, DOM, 3+ levels of inheritance,
> and some *very* large strings variables) code. Never had a single problem
> that wasn't my fault (e.g., did something dumb and ate too much system
> memory with a script, etc.)
>
>[/color]
IMHO it appears to be a threading problem. Its the libraries that PHP
employs that creaet the problem. For sure, thread problems only occur
under load conditions, thats why they are such a pain to diagnoze. Lise
of strings isn't an issue unless one is concerned with stack overflows
which is more of a sloppy coding issue

**Daniel Andersen** · Jul 17 '05, 11:54 AM

Re: PHP5 Stability issues?

NSpam wrote:
[color=blue]
> Joshua Beall wrote:[color=green]
>> What software stack are you using? I have been running PHP5 on a Linux
>> 2.4 kernel, and Apache for the webserver for several months in a
>> production
>> environment. No problems, and I have some pretty "demanding" (i.e., non
>> trivial code dealing with very large objects, DOM, 3+ levels of
>> inheritance,
>> and some *very* large strings variables) code. Never had a single
>> problem that wasn't my fault (e.g., did something dumb and ate too much
>> system memory with a script, etc.)
>>
>>[/color]
> IMHO it appears to be a threading problem. Its the libraries that PHP
> employs that creaet the problem. For sure, thread problems only occur
> under load conditions, thats why they are such a pain to diagnoze. Lise
> of strings isn't an issue unless one is concerned with stack overflows
> which is more of a sloppy coding issue[/color]

I'll respond to both posts at once here to save a bit of time :)

I'm running Linux 2.4.26, which we run on other servers and appears as
stable as can be hoped for. Apache is version 1.3.33 (which i believe is
unthreaded, i was under the impression apache didn't start threading until
the 2.x release series, but correct me if i'm wrong :)

There is basically no load at all on the server, as this is just our test
machine as we rewrite the system in PHP5, so the only person loading pages
off the machine is me, and it does nothing else. The pages are complicated
to the extent there is a lot of OO and custom error handlers set,
auto-prepend and appends etc etc, but I wouldn't think they'd actually
cause any kind of load.

PHP's configure line is as follows, in case that helps at all:
'./configure' '--with-mysql' '--with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs'
'--prefix=/usr/local/php/norm' '--enable-track-vars'
'--with-config-file-path=/usr/local/php/norm' '--enable-magic-quotes'
'--enable-ftp' '--enable-calander' '--with-zlib' '--with-gd'
'--with-png-dir--with-jpeg-dir' '--with-curl'

Thanks,
Daniel Andersen

PHP5 Stability issues?

PHP5 Stability issues?

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