Segmentation fault 11 error – Voodoo Zoodoo

A problem we dealt with that we very much hope no one else ever sees: a brand new virtual private server install, CentOS, Apache, PHP5, and Webmin, and everything worked except our Drupal site, which came up completely blank.

I am getting a seg fault when I try and run. this line is showing up in the apache error log

'exit signal Segmentation fault (11)'

anyone familiar with this?

here are some drupal notes:

http://drupal.org/node/63181

http://drupal.org/node/57783#comment-167102

Our host, ServInt, turned off Zend optimizer (which reportedly doesn't optimize much) and everything started working again.

You are currently on the most recent PHP release for the CentOS packaging system. I have run some tests that seem to indicate that your errors are caused by Zend Optimizer.

The many threads make this solution look suspiciously easy, but we'll take the good voodoo with the bad. (Note that many things can cause the segmentation fault. If you don't have Zend optimizer running, I'd try turning it on. This bug is that weird.)

• Debian bugs thread with Segmentation fault 11
• From http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=24012

  We can't fix every library out there that isn't thread-safe,
  so either don't compile PHP with such extensions that use
  those libraries or run Apache2 with non-threaded MPM.

  Safest bet is to use Apache 1.3.27 anyway.

• But the (or similar) bug has been seen in PHP 4 on Apache 1.3:
  http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=24592