Fast CGI (spawn-fcgi / php-cgi) crashes/dies/hangs

[Grzegorz Nosek]

On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 09:21:18PM -0500, nerdgrind wrote:
> Gentlemen,
> 
> I respect your'e opinions, but for all you're heated desperation to defend php-fcgi you may have forgotten this thread was started by someone who found php-fcgi to be unstable, and he hasn't been able to find a solution. I found one that worked for me when php-fcgi failed. Offering a solution to someone that results in the same failure doesn't seem to be a solution to me.

Hi,

PHP is utter crap. It *does* crash regularly, deep inside its bowels,
regardless of whatever thin interface to the outside world (SAPI) you
use. You simply have to plan for it and expect SEGVs flying back and
forth.

Using mod_php simply hides the crashes from you and you might have been
blissfully unaware of the problem (how are you going to log it if your
web server went down together with PHP? Also, many PHP bugs come up when
cleaning up after a request, so you wouldn't ever notice it apart from a
"child terminated with sig11" in error.log).

So now you blame the FastCGI SAPI, which also needs external help to
keep running.

I've been using Apache+php-fcgi for years now without major issues
related to FastCGI. Under this scheme Apache is a poor process manager
and a heavyweight .htaccess interpreter/static file server.

BTW, I don't think I could care less about your method of running PHP, I
just want to keep the facts straight. http://xkcd.com/386/ I guess.

Best regards,
 Grzegorz Nosek