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Hi there,

After a few days in production, php-fcgi hanged, knocking down all users with a nasty "500 - Internal Server Error"

I tried restarting both hiawatha and php-fcgi without any luck, php-cgi won't respond. It will open the socket, but it will hang forever.

As I mentioned, the server was in production, so I had no other choice than to apt-get install apache2 to bring the application back to life.

When that was done, I launched the fast cgi daemon again to experiment (after all, Apache wasn't using it) and this time it did work.

I remember this happening once in my personal server, running 7.2, but it never happened again.

I have nothing in the logs, other than stopping and starting php-fcgi. Needless to say, I cannot reproduce the problem nor feel I safe to bring hiawatha back without knowing what happened.

Is there any general recommendation for configuring php-fcgi + hiawatha in a production environment? Is there anything I can do to try to trace the problem next time? I have a default php-cgi configuration file. My /etc/hiawatha/php-fcgi.conf looks like this:

PidFile = /var/run/php-fcgi.pid
Forks = 3
MaxRequests = 100
Server = /usr/bin/php5-cgi ; 127.0.0.1:2005 ; www-data ; /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

I will appreciate any help on this.

Regards,
Tito

Hiawatha version: 7.3
Operating System: Ubuntu 9.10

Just in case, this is my /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini:

[PHP]
engine = On
zend.ze1_compatibility_mode = Off
short_open_tag = On
asp_tags = Off
precision    =  12
y2k_compliance = On
output_buffering = Off
zlib.output_compression = Off
implicit_flush = Off
unserialize_callback_func=
serialize_precision = 100
allow_call_time_pass_reference = On
safe_mode = Off
safe_mode_gid = Off
safe_mode_include_dir =
safe_mode_exec_dir =
safe_mode_allowed_env_vars = PHP_
safe_mode_protected_env_vars = LD_LIBRARY_PATH
disable_functions =
disable_classes =
expose_php = On
max_execution_time = 30     ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 60 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 16M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (16MB)
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
display_errors = On
display_startup_errors = Off
log_errors = Off
log_errors_max_len = 1024
ignore_repeated_errors = Off
ignore_repeated_source = Off
report_memleaks = On
track_errors = Off
variables_order = "EGPCS"
register_globals = Off
register_long_arrays = On
register_argc_argv = On
auto_globals_jit = On
post_max_size = 8M
magic_quotes_gpc = On
magic_quotes_runtime = Off
magic_quotes_sybase = Off
auto_prepend_file =
auto_append_file =
default_mimetype = "text/html"
doc_root =
user_dir =
enable_dl = Off
file_uploads = On
upload_max_filesize = 2M
allow_url_fopen = On
allow_url_include = Off
default_socket_timeout = 60
[Date]
[filter]
[iconv]
[sqlite]
[Pcre]
[Syslog]
define_syslog_variables  = Off
[mail function]
SMTP = localhost
smtp_port = 25
[SQL]
sql.safe_mode = Off
[ODBC]
odbc.allow_persistent = On
odbc.check_persistent = On
odbc.max_persistent = -1
odbc.max_links = -1
odbc.defaultlrl = 4096
odbc.defaultbinmode = 1
[MySQL]
mysql.allow_persistent = On
mysql.max_persistent = -1
mysql.max_links = -1
mysql.default_port =
mysql.default_socket =
mysql.default_host =
mysql.default_user =
mysql.default_password =
mysql.connect_timeout = 60
mysql.trace_mode = Off
[MySQLi]
mysqli.max_links = -1
mysqli.default_port = 3306
mysqli.default_socket =
mysqli.default_host =
mysqli.default_user =
mysqli.default_pw =
mysqli.reconnect = Off
[mSQL]
msql.allow_persistent = On
msql.max_persistent = -1
msql.max_links = -1
[OCI8]
[PostgresSQL]
pgsql.allow_persistent = On
pgsql.auto_reset_persistent = Off
pgsql.max_persistent = -1
pgsql.max_links = -1
pgsql.ignore_notice = 0
pgsql.log_notice = 0
[Sybase]
sybase.allow_persistent = On
sybase.max_persistent = -1
sybase.max_links = -1
sybase.min_error_severity = 10
sybase.min_message_severity = 10
sybase.compatability_mode = Off
[Sybase-CT]
sybct.allow_persistent = On
sybct.max_persistent = -1
sybct.max_links = -1
sybct.min_server_severity = 10
sybct.min_client_severity = 10
[bcmath]
bcmath.scale = 0
[browscap]
[Informix]
ifx.default_host =
ifx.default_user =
ifx.default_password =
ifx.allow_persistent = On
ifx.max_persistent = -1
ifx.max_links = -1
ifx.textasvarchar = 0
ifx.byteasvarchar = 0
ifx.charasvarchar = 0
ifx.blobinfile = 0
ifx.nullformat = 0
[Session]
session.save_handler = files
session.use_cookies = 1
session.name = PHPSESSID
session.auto_start = 0
session.cookie_lifetime = 0
session.cookie_path = /
session.cookie_domain =
session.cookie_httponly = 
session.serialize_handler = php
session.gc_divisor     = 100
session.gc_maxlifetime = 36000
session.bug_compat_42 = 1
session.bug_compat_warn = 1
session.referer_check =
session.entropy_length = 0
session.entropy_file =
session.cache_limiter = nocache
session.cache_expire = 180
session.use_trans_sid = 0
session.hash_function = 0
session.hash_bits_per_character = 4
url_rewriter.tags = "a=href,area=href,frame=src,input=src,form=,fieldset="
[MSSQL]
mssql.allow_persistent = On
mssql.max_persistent = -1
mssql.max_links = -1
mssql.min_error_severity = 10
mssql.min_message_severity = 10
mssql.compatability_mode = Off
mssql.secure_connection = Off
[Assertion]
[COM]
[mbstring]
[FrontBase]
[gd]
[exif]
[Tidy]
tidy.clean_output = Off
[soap]
soap.wsdl_cache_enabled=1
soap.wsdl_cache_dir="/tmp"
soap.wsdl_cache_ttl=86400

Is your application using the IMAP module in PHP? At the moment I also experience problems with php-cgi. It seems that the IMAP module is buggy and freezes PHP up.

Precisely, Hugo. It turned out that a php script that downloads emails periodically was hanging. Hiawatha was doing its job by dropping it, but php was stuck with it. As frozen scripts were gathering up, php started to fail :/