[Mediawiki-l] Odd issue with hosted MediaWiki

[Ray Van Dolson]

We're running an instance of MediaWiki 1.15.0 on an A2 Hosting server
(runs CentOS 5.4 + Apache/PHP5 I believe).

When we modify our LocalSettings.php file, several subsequent requests
(usually six or so) to the wiki come up blank.  After these initial
requests, everything comes up normally again.

Typically I'd suspect some sort of PHP error, but our PHP error log
file doesn't spit anything out, and enabling error reporting doesn't
spit anything out either.

Examining the six initial requests after a LocalSettings.php change
shows the following (via wireshark):

  1. SYN, SYN/ACK, ACK handshake to server.
  2. GET /wiki/index.php/Main_Page sent to server.
  3. ACK from server
  4. FIN, ACK from server.

And, I note know entries indicating our connection occurred in our
Apache logfile.

This seems a lot to me like our host's Apache server is being restarted
or something along those lines (though it does seem to continue still
accepting connections on port 80 during this "weirdness").

Anyone have any ideas as to what we might be experiencing?  Especially
if you're familiar with how a hosted Apache setup might be configured
(PHP caching, etc).

Hmm... maybe something like Zend/Turk is caching a compiled version of
LocalSettings.php -- but would the web server exhibit the behavior
we're seeing above if LocalSettings.php was changed I wonder?

Thanks for any thoughts,

Ray