Tim Starling wrote:
It sounds like you're running a threaded MPM and PHP is segfaulting. To avoid having MediaWiki interfere with other apps, use the prefork MPM whenever you are using PHP. This is strongly recommended by the PHP manual.
I'm running Apache2 as Prefork MPM [1]; in Debian, that is done automagically when installing PHP. At least it is supposed to do so according to the documentation and to my package database.
I believe I have written a post or two in the past about debugging and fixing segfaults. I'll repeat some basic principles here in brief.
Is there any way to determine, if httpd (or whatever) really *is* segfaulting?
At least in "mytop" I can see that sql statements seem to be processed; somehow they have to get there.
If I enter a nonexisting article name in the search box, in "mytop" something like this appears:
Query SELECT page_id, page_namespace, page_title FROM `page`,`searchindex` WHERE page_id=si_page AND [...]
The rest of the sql statement i can not read (it doesn't do line breaks). However, this appears like the beginning of an valid statement, even if it simply stays there "forever".
The first thing to try is the voodoo magic method: change versions of things randomly until it starts working. Disable suspicious PHP extensions. Upgrade or downgrade PHP. Upgrade MediaWiki.
Sorry, most of this is not an option; I'm running Debian "Stable" for some reason and can't break everything else just to play around unsystematically. I'm currently trying to upgrade MediaWiki, but this will take at least several days, even if it succeeds.
What I tried in the last days is to upgrade the hardware; MediaWiki runs now on an Opteron 1212 HE with 2 GB RAM (before it was a Celeron with 512 MB RAM). Even if the configuration is mostly new, the error started to pop up again after a few days.
Should I file a bug about this?
Greetings, -asb
[1] http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/apache2-mpm-prefork, http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/libapache2-mod-php5, http://packages.debian.org/stable/web/php5