Posted by warth33 on 12/21/07 13:01

Hello

I have a php site. Some page needs to call an external program. The
programs are home made c# applications.

It uses to work without problem. For a while. Maybe it work for some
hour. Or for a day. Or even for a week.

At a certain point, when a php script calls the exe file, the
application freezes. The following happens:

<?
$return_value = exec('path_to_exe_file');
echo $return_value;
?>

Well, the exec is executed (I can see that, the exe fil does what it
has to do). But it doesnt return to the php-script. The php-script
waits infinitely that the app will return, but it will not return. At
a certain point the time execution exeedes.

If I go to the command line and execute an exe file (the same one that
exec calls), then it works without problem, and returns immediatly.
But from the exec call it doesnt return.

How do I solve this? Well, I restart the server. And hen everything
works again. Which means that the script can use exec again without
waiting infinitely.

When the problems begin (when the exec begins to fail) the server can
still work without problem. All the scripts run. The only scripts that
dont run are those that have the exec call inside.

error.log doesnt says anything about this.

Im running apache 2.X on windows server 2003. PHP version is 5.x.

I have put log function before and after every single call to exec. I
analyzed it, but I can not understand why the exec fails. It only
stops to get back the return value from the c# app. The c# app can
also be a simple one with only a console.write (something like echo).
But when exec has hanged up neither that will work.

Someone can see the problem?

[Back to original message]