[H-GEN] Apache segfaulting... how to debug

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Wed Jul 9 22:23:25 EDT 2003


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On 2003-07-10, Michael Anthon wrote:

> The number of faults I'm getting would otherwise be 
> noticed by users I'm sure (or maybe this is being overly kind to my users?)

I'd say you're being overly kind, if your users are remotely
like mine.  One thing I like about the BSD variants is the daily
report of segfaults (amongst many other things).  From this, I
know that the users of AbiWord, OpenOffice, various KDE bits,
Mozilla, Netscape and Opera experience regular crashes and they
never report any of these -- in fact, if I ring up and ask how
things are going the morning after a flurry of this sort of
thing, they'll always tell me that everything is great[1].

> I'm not really in a position to do hardware tests on this machine at the 
>  moment, might get a chance over the weekend but I doubt it.

It's something to consider if other steps don't produce results,
but it certainly sounds as if you have other things that would
be worth exploring first.

> Following David's suggestions, I've poked around a bit.  Neither apache 
> or the apache php module is linked against pthreads, however, the oci8 
> php module IS linked against it.  Is that likely to cause a problem?  I 
> might try rebuilding apache and php to see if I can get then linked 
> against libpthread as well.

I'd second the suggestion to rebuild the whole apache suite with
care from the latest sources and see how it goes.

Cheers, Greg

[1] If I ring up and say something like: "you had a problem
    yesterday with a dud floppy when you were transferring data
    from the Windows box to [a FreeBSD box]", they say: "Wow!
    How did you know that?"  and my god-like reputation is
    raised a little bit further -- but only because I take the
    few minutes to read each daily report.

    I don't bother to point out all the core dumps in the
    bloatware, because there's nothing I can do about them and
    there's no point in making an issue about it if the users
    don't care enough to complain.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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