Friday, May 20, 2011

Apache/PHP Crash 3221225477

A friend of mine had problems recently running Apache, PHP and MYSQL on Windows Server 2003. The problems occurred using the community version of eGroupWare (a web based project manager), although we suspected that the issues weren't just limited to that product.

The problem was the now seemingly famous (if you Google it) Apache crash: Parent: child process exited with status 3221225477 -- Restarting. This problem is apparently an access violation.

If you have been unfortunate enough to experience this, and you have read the things about copying DLLs to the windows system32 folder (and maybe checked your PATH environmental variable before you did that!), you might want to read the following snippet from windows.php.net:

Windows users: please mind that we do no longer provide builds created with Visual Studio C++ 6. It is impossible to maintain a high quality and safe build of PHP for Windows using this unmaintained compiler.

For Apache SAPIs (php5_apache2_2.dll), be sure that you use a Visual Studio C++ 9 version of Apache. We recommend the Apache builds as provided by ApacheLounge.

We installed the 2.2.18 build from Apache Lounge, we installed the 5.3.6 build from windows.php.net - and the crashing has now stopped. Lovely Jubbly.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Flash Debugger Crash

UPDATE 20th May 2011.
I'm very happy to announce that this problem seems to have been fixed in the 10.3 version of the Flash Debug Player in Windows. I'm also happy to say that Adobe did indeed contact my colleague Alejandro today to ask us to check again or provide more details. Nice.
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Since Flex 4 and Flash Player 10 were published, we have been getting crashes when running the external debug Flash Player from FlashDevelop, somewhere after release 10.0.32. As workaround we just reverted back to the Flash Standalone Debug player that we knew worked, and carried on. Recently we wanted to move to Flex 4.5, and this became more of an issue as we need to now use the 10.2 player.

Originally we were pointing the finger at FlashDevelop (because of past posts etc. on this issue), but we have established that this is in fact a Flash Debugger Player bug and we know pretty much exactly how it happens. The fact that is has nothing to do with FlashDevelop.

If you are using resource bundles in Flex, and you have a file with keys and values that exceeds a point just over 12k, and you compile these files into the SWF using the locale=en_US (or = whatever) compiler option, this crash will start happening.

The workaround is to create a resource module swf of your resource files and load that at runtime, and then the crash stops (see this adobe article). Alternatively, you can break your resource bundle files up into less that 12k each. Please remember that this only seems to apply to the external debug player (projector).

We have registered this bug with Adobe - FP-6790 at https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/, but because it relates to "a potential security issue", we couldn't see it or review it afterward!

Really hope this helps somebody with the same problem. This was true for Flex SDK 4.5 first release build and Flash Player Debugger (projector, sa_debug) 10.2 r159.