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Posted by Adam Atlas on 11/25/05 09:06
(Apache/2.0.55, PHP/4.4.1)
I am using an "Action" directive in my Apache configuration to map a
certain file type (by means of AddType and AddHandler) to a PHP script.
I wasn't sure if this would work, since the Apache docs say the Action
directive is for mapping a handler name to a CGI script in particular.
But it seemed to work at first.
Then a mysterious bug arose: Sometimes it works perfectly, and other
times the output is a totally blank page. It seems that if I haven't
viewed a page for a while, it chooses to do one of these at random
(though it is blank more often than not), and then it persists in the
same behaviour until I reload it many times. (That is, usually a page
appearing blank will eventually display if I reload it many times;
however, only rarely will a correctly-displayed page regress to
appearing blank after reloads.) Checking with `curl -i', it would
appear to a client program that the request was perfectly successful:
all the headers are there (with the correct content-type), it has an
HTTP/1.1 200 OK line, and so on (and there's nothing unusual in the
server's access or error logs), except Content-length is 0, and there
is indeed no content at all after the two newlines.
WTF?? Since when do computers behave non-deterministically? I should
hope, if a program is not going to behave correctly, that it at least
do so predictably and consistently. That would make debugging it much
easier. But what am I to make of this Schrodinger's Bug? How do I even
approach the debugging process?
(Also, if anyone could suggest a workaround, an alternate method of
having a PHP script handle files with a certain extension, then that
would be just as welcome. Though I'd like to stay within mod_php,
avoiding a CGI-based technique, because I'd prefer to not start a
process every time these pages are requested.)
Thanks.
-- Adam Atlas
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