Question
Segmentation fault on certain WordPress pages on Ubuntu / Apache / PHP
- Posted on February 3, 2015
Asked by Dima
I’m getting reproducible errors when trying to access certain parts of a WordPress instance. This identical behavior occurs on two WordPress instances hosted on the same box.
The two actions that fail (and lead to an error page in Chrome (Error code: ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE), and an error logged on server) are:
- Attempting to access the “General” settings page (/wp-admin/options-general.php)
- Attempting to confirm the deletion of any plugin
Apache2 error.log:
[core:notice] [pid 9173] AH00052: child pid 9181 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)```
Server Info:
```Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-24-generic x86_64)```
```PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.5 (cli) (built: Oct 29 2014 11:59:10)
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.3, Copyright (c) 1999-2014, by Zend Technologies
with Xdebug v2.2.3, Copyright (c) 2002-2013, by Derick Rethans```
Please let me know what other information may be helpful. Thanks in advance.This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!
Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.
I found a fix for this, it requires a patch update of libssh2-php. See this thread here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/php-ssh2/+bug/1407377
Restarted my Droplet (you could probably just restart Apache) and it works now!
After an entire day of trying to trace this down, no solutions worked. I eventually however turned Apache to debug level logging and immediately noticed hundreds of notices/warnings with Google’s mod_pagespeed for Apache trying to rewrite images from Jetpack’s Photon images.
I did a simple a2dismod pagespeed and immediately there were no more segmentation faults.
Have also noticed my sites are actually running faster now with mod pagespeed turned off.
There seems to be quite a few bug reports about pagespeed causing segmentation faults.
Not sure if its just mod_pagespeed or the combination of mod_pagespeed, wordpress and php … but turned off now problem gone.
I am done with it for now and in the process of moving everything to Nginx now. Tracing faults on Apache always turns into a nightmare, with Nginx I can find errors in a few seconds to a minute. Already spent the last 6 weeks getting to know Nginx and it rocks and now going back to my Apache server to try and diagnose this segfault error felt like I was in a different world where I could not speak the language anymore.
you absolute legend this fixed and issue i was having with a script!!