ID: 36755 User updated by: tif at avatartechnology dot com Reported By: tif at avatartechnology dot com Status: Bogus Bug Type: Performance problem Operating System: Suse Linux PHP Version: 4.4.2 New Comment:
I think I've finally made a major discovery regarding this bug. Our webapp uses some unconventional techniques and operates on some rather large datasets. By logging apache process IDs that exhibit the problem and tracking exactly what the history of that process was, I believe I have located the problem although I haven't reduced it to a trivial reproduction. My theory is: There is a specific kind of out-of-memory condition that corrupts the PHP process. When we have encountered this problem the script dies without outputting any error message. Apache logs the request as outputting 5 bytes. Future requests that use the same process do not have all of the usual memory available to them. The "unconventional techniques" that our webapp uses are an intense combination of "eval" statements, functions using "var args", array operations, output buffering, and error capturing. I understand that reducing this to a small script that causes the problem is the right way to proceed but my gut says that I could spend a week trying to create it and still not succeed. Hopefully, this additional information will be useful to someone even if the PHP team chooses not to address the problem. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2006-03-17 19:38:06] tif at avatartechnology dot com I understand the whole "this might be fixed already" thing, but I don't think debugging this bug is going to fit the normal model. Even if I do upgrade, it could be months before I see the problem again. Heck, you'll probably have a new version I need to upgrade to by then. I want to help you find this bug but I'm out of ideas. How about some suggestions for what to monitor, or what to look at next time it happens, or what might count as an unusual condition that could cause this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2006-03-16 08:40:06] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you for taking the time to report a problem with PHP. Unfortunately you are not using a current version of PHP -- the problem might already be fixed. Please download a new PHP version from http://www.php.net/downloads.php If you are able to reproduce the bug with one of the latest versions of PHP, please change the PHP version on this bug report to the version you tested and change the status back to "Open". Again, thank you for your continued support of PHP. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2006-03-16 02:16:59] tif at avatartechnology dot com Description: ------------ We have a webapp which works flawlessly for months at a time, and then suddenly has memory usage problems. We've debugged this enough to know that this is not a gradual growing of memory usage, but a sudden jump. We have put in a check using get_memory_usage that runs on the startup of each page and the returned number stays very steady (around 16K), then it will suddenly start returning a large number (around 4M seems to be a number I see alot). We even wrote a 1-line php script which prints the number and monitored it. It remains unchanged until this problem occurs and then it remains at the high number until apache is restarted. Searching the logs, I find no unusual activity at the time of the change. I lied about the PHP version because we have seen this on many versions of PHP4, different linux distros, and different Apache versions, with and without Zend. I'll be happy to perform most any debug steps you can think of. We are unfortunately unable to install random versions of PHP since these are production servers. We are currently running 4.3.10. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=36755&edit=1
