Apache exit signal Segmentation fault (11) is caused by homeloader.so

minorgod

• March 06, 2014 21:35

Greetings, I'm posting this here in hopes that it will help some people diagnose a very annoying and difficult to diagnose problem with Apache and PHP. You may notice symptoms such as incomplete or empty responses from requests -- pages not loading or partially loading. In a browser's network debugging console such as in Firebug or Chrome, you may see an HTTP status code of 200 returned in the response, but it's marked as an error, and sometimes if you dig deeper you'll see an error message such as "Incomplete Chunked Encoding". After looking through all your php and apache error logs you'll likely find some error messages such as: [Mon May 06 00:38:57 2013] [notice] child pid 4945 exit signal Segmentation fault (11) After spending months scratching my head over this, running EasyApache and updating to the latest PHP 5.3 version (5.3.28) and latest Apache 2.2 version (2.2.26), disabling mod deflate and gzip compression, disabling my dbg module, etc., the problems were still present. Finally I tried disabling homeloader.so in my php.ini and all the problems disappeared, no more segfaults, no more probs loading pages. I did a little research and found that this module is used by CPanel for something to do with loading PEAR modules. I checked my apps and disabling it didn't cause any probs, and I know I'm using some old PEAR libs in some of my code, so I was happy to see they still worked. I then ran EasyApache one last time to re-enable mod deflate and gzip compression and was dismayed to see that my problems returned. I thought it wasn't homeloader.so after all, but then I checked my php.ini and found that EasyApache had re-enabled homeloader.so. I then did a little more research and found that there's a setting in WHM that adds homeloader.so to your php.ini if you have it enabled and removes it if you disable it. That setting can be found in WHM under: Home >> Software >> Module Installers >> PHP Extensions and Applications Package On that screen, the first option you'll see is "PHP Extensions and Applications Package Magic User Loader". If you disable that and then run EasyApache, it will disable homeloader.so in your php.ini. So, hopefully this info will help someone.

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  cPanelMichael

  • March 07, 2014 13:56

  Hello :) Are you using DSO as your PHP handler? Thank you.

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  minorgod

  • March 07, 2014 19:57

  [quote="cPanelMichael, post: 1590061">Hello :) Are you using DSO as your PHP handler?
  Yep. PHP5 hander is DSO with Apache suEXEC. No handler is set for PHP4.

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  cPanelMichael

  • March 13, 2014 18:16

  Yes, there have been reports of issues with homeloader.so when DSO is configured as the PHP handler. Internal case 63838 was opened with our development team, but the issue was not reliably reproduced. Feel free to open a support ticket if you can offer steps for us to reliably reproduce the issue. Thank you.

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  minorgod

  • March 14, 2014 19:01

  [quote="cPanelMichael, post: 1595322">Yes, there have been reports of issues with homeloader.so when DSO is configured as the PHP handler. Internal case 63838 was opened with our development team, but the issue was not reliably reproduced. Feel free to open a support ticket if you can offer steps for us to reliably reproduce the issue. Thank you.
  Okay, thanks for the info. I'll open a support case with full details of my server config and steps to reproduce, and reference this thread so they can update this thread if they find a solution.

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  cPanelMichael

  • March 14, 2014 19:16

  Feel free to post the ticket number here and I will be sure to update this thread with the outcome. Thank you.

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  minorgod

  • March 14, 2014 23:12

  Ticket id is 4664781.

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  cPanelPeter cPanel Staff

  • March 16, 2014 14:41

  Hello, I just wanted to update this thread, the case has currently been marked as closed and not reproducible. Several analysts as well as developers have attempted to reproduce this problem and have not been able to do so. That does not mean the problem doesn't exist, we do see that there have been several tickets reporting this or a similar problem, but unless our developers can reproduce the problem, it's very difficult to fix. I encourage anyone else who encounters this issue to please open a support ticket and mention this forum thread as well as the internal case number 63838. If we can get access to a server that has this issue, our developers may be able to diagnose and find a fix for it.

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