Last night I saw something weird at Codenone. Actually, it was just a blank page returned from Drupal. PHP was set maximum memory limit to 64MB. It should be sufficient for a small site like Codenone. I noticed that the blank page often occurred on pages with comments. Below are my investigations.

1. Blank page will occur only on some nodes with some amount of comments.
2. There was no logs in Drupal.
3. There was no logs in virtualhost level.

Above were what I know regarding to my permission on that host. So I had to ask the host admin to look at global logs and he found as follows.

[Tue Feb 13 00:32:20 2007] [notice] child pid 17856 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:32:24 2007] [notice] child pid 17854 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:32:37 2007] [notice] child pid 17806 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:33:34 2007] [notice] child pid 17858 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:33:45 2007] [notice] child pid 17859 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:34:22 2007] [notice] child pid 17689 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:34:41 2007] [notice] child pid 17768 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:34:49 2007] [notice] child pid 17853 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Feb 13 00:35:01 2007] [notice] child pid 17852 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Oops! It was segfault. There might be something wrong in mod_php or Apache. Anyway, I don't know. Restarting httpd make it back to work properly again.

Tags: drupal, apache, codenone, php