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PHP

How to post useful bug reports

With the latest two PHP updates, some users reported problems with FPM, with APC, etc… It was about segfaults, problematic init scripts, and so on… But all those comments couldn’t really help me to diagnose the problems in an efficient manner.

Here are the pieces of information that you have to provide to help me fixing your problem :

  • What is your distribution? (disclaimer : only Debian stable is supported)
  • What is your architecture? amd64 or i386?
  • Which exact PHP version are you using? 5.4.x or 5.3.x?
  • Which SAPI are you using? mod_php? CGI? FPM? Embed?
  • What’s the full content of your /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d files?
  • What is the result of dpkg -l 'php*' | grep '^.i' ?
  • Please provide a textual description of the bug (don’t hesitate to provide some code, the expected result…).
  • Please provide any modified configuration directive.
  • Please provide a backtrace, after installing php5-dbg.

Now, some tips to have a stable PHP stack :

  • Only use PHP packages from Dotdeb when possible.
  • Be sure to upgrade them to the latest version.
  • Uninstall php5-suhosin if you don’t use it explicitly. The development of this extension has kinda been “stalled”.
  • If you have problems with extensions, deactivate and reactivate them one by one to find the guilty one.

Because blog comments are not the best place to report issues, Dotdeb uses the Github bugtracker for now. Be sure to follow the above instructions, to read the official PHP bug tracker and also the existing Dotdeb bug reports before submitting any new issue.

Improving the overall stability of the Dotdeb packages requires efforts from us all. Thanks in advance for your help.

19 replies on “How to post useful bug reports”

Thanks for the heads up, definitely helpful for the future when reporting issues. I was the first person to report the APC segfault issues. You’ve mentioned problems with Suhosin, I’m using Suhosin! So before I submit a correct bug report I’ll try without Suhosin.

I get errors with APC too. Here is my actual apc.ini :

extension=apc.so
apc.enabled=1
apc.enable_cli = 1
apc.num_files_hint = 1024
apc.shm_segments=1
apc.shm_size=512M
apc.ttl=3600
apc.user_ttl=3600
apc.filters=apc\.php

When I disable APC or if I remove apc.filters=apc\.php I don’t get any error.

Hope it could help.

I had a lot of problems related to APC since the last update, a lot of SegFaults with the APC cache method for the db queries of PHPBB for instance.
I disabled that, and still had SegFaults with a simple upload progress that uses APC. But I didn’t reinstall PHP-APC the way you indicate here. Now that i did, hopefully, the bugs will be gone.

Anyway, even with that latest bugs (that pissed me off, of course), I want to thank you for your very, very, very useful work. I mean it.
I love debian and its stability but I almost always need the latest version of PHP and without you, i’d be almost completely lost.
I wanted to thank you for a long time, now’s the occasion 🙂

I’m having the same problem with php-apc.
Tried reinstalling, purging and even reinstalling everything related to PHP.
It keeps segfaulting if apc is installed but if not, everything works just fine.
Where should I start?

kernel: [ 2156.227080] php5-fpm[4580]: segfault at e98 ip 00007f38e38e6c89 sp 00007fff1fb6b780 error 4 in apc.so[7f38e38c9000+24000]

@Toni Lähdekorpi : first read the above blog and follow the different steps, including providing a backtrace and report useful bug reports (or contribute to existing ones).

Also make sure that the following line is present in /etc/init.d/php5-fpm :

export ZEND_DONT_UNLOAD_MODULES=1

FYI APC 3.1.12 from Dotdeb is the same as the official APC 3.1.13

By Post Author

I need APC for my Magento setup.
Also:

16:35:54 root@autopalvelu:/var/www/magento$ dpkg -l php5-dbg; gdb php
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-==============================================================-==============================================================-============================================================================================================================================
ii php5-dbg 5.4.6-1~dotdeb.0 Debug symbols for PHP5
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.0.1-debian
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type “show copying”
and “show warranty” for details.
This GDB was configured as “x86_64-linux-gnu”.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
…
Reading symbols from /usr/bin/php…Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/php5…done.
(no debugging symbols found)…done.
(gdb)

Just a quick note, if suhosin isn’t such a required package that even the uninstall is mentioned, could you remove the dependency for it from php5-fpm? I don’t see why is suhosin required for a simple php5-fpm.

@Zsolt Ero : php5-suhosin is a suggestion, not a requirement, you can avoid it with a decent APT frontend (dselect, aptitude, synaptic…). I’ll remove it in future releases, thanks for the suggestion.

By Post Author

Hi, i Have similar errors on Debian 7 (Wheezy) i Have installed php 55, and i want install “build-dep php5” with command:

~# apt-get build-dep php5
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libpq-dev : Depends: libpq5 (= 9.1.9-1) but 9.3.0-2.pgdg60+1 is to be installed
E: Build-dependencies for php5 could not be satisfied.

~# apt-get build-dep php5 && apt-get source -b php5
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libpq-dev : Depends: libpq5 (= 9.1.9-1) but 9.3.0-2.pgdg60+1 is to be installed
E: Build-dependencies for php5 could not be satisfied.

ANY IDEAS TO SOLVE THIS?

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