[wp-testers] wp-admin/index.php gives a segmentation fault.

[Dougal Campbell]

Adrian Hayter wrote:
> I've tried looking on the forums for this question, and nobody has 
> responded to my query (all other forum topics on the subject have 
> solutions that do not work). I am running the latest stable version 
> (2.7) and my wp-admin/index.php occasionally fails to load, and apache 
> reports a segmentation fault. I say "occasionally" because it decides 
> to do this at seemingly random moments, but these moments last several 
> minutes. It happened again about 10 minutes ago, and now the page is 
> loading perfectly.

First, there's no way for WordPress, in and of itself, to cause a 
segmentation fault on the machine. The root of the problem is going to 
lie somewhere in a system binary (PHP, apache, a php or apache 
extension, or system library). That said, it could be that some 
particular bit of PHP code in WordPress, a theme, or plugin could be 
triggering whatever condition that is related to the segfault. It could 
be due to exhaustion of memory or some other resource, or it could just 
be a buggy third-party PHP extension.

You should probably carefully check your PHP and Apache configuration. 
Make sure you aren't loading any extra modules that aren't absolutely 
needed. Disabling your WP plugins one at a time, and monitoring the 
segfaults might possibly help you narrow down what's causing it. For 
example, if you have a plugin that does manipulation of graphics, and 
disabling it makes the problem go away, then you might have a buggy 
version of the GD or Image Magick libraries?

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org <mailto:dougal at gunters.org>>
http://dougal.gunters.org/
http://twitter.com/dougal