Segmentation fault when accessing a PHP page

Question

Sometimes when one of our Apache web servers is restarted, we experience segmentation faults when any PHP page is subsequently accessed. The following line is printed in the httpd error_log:

[Wed Jun 16 10:59:33 2010] [notice] child pid 31513 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

There will be one of these lines for each PHP page that is accessed. This appears to happen randomly - the "workaround" to-date is to restart httpd, which eventually fixes the problem (almost always after a single restart). Although we only see this happen rarely, it still happens frequently enough to be of concern.

So my question is, why is this happening in the first place? Is this a known bug with the version of Apache / PHP / Linux / etc that we are using? Any ideas?

The environment is:

• Fedora 11
• Apache 2.2.15 (Default settings)
• PHP 5.2.13

I can provide more information if that would help narrow things down, since this error message is rather generic...

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

http://bugs.php.net/bugs-generating-backtrace.php includes information on compiling PHP with debugging symbols and starting apache httpd in single threaded mode.

It's all you need.