PHP/MapScript on Debian and Ubuntu

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Steven Monai wrote:
> Hello, all (but especially the PHP/MapScript devs):
> 
> Before I go to the trouble of trying to contact the Debian package
> maintainers, I'm posting my question here first, just in case someone in the
> Mapserver community has any information. 
> 
> Everything I've seen on this list over the past few years has indicated that
> the best way to run PHP/MapScript is in CGI mode. Yet the Debian package
> maintainers seem to be under the impression that PHP/MapScript is most
> stable running in an Apache2 DSO, even going so far as to patch
> PHP/MapScript so that it refuses to run in a CGI (or even a CLI)
> environment. Does anyone have any idea why Debian's 'php5-mapscript' package
> maintainers have done this? Do they know something that I/we don't? Is
> PHP/MapScript not stable in PHP5 when run as CGI/CLI?
> 
> I really would like to be able to run ka-map's 'precache2.php' script from
> the command line in Debian (or Ubuntu) without having to compile my own
> php_mapscript.so.
> 
> Regards,
> -SM
> --


I can not help you much with the Debian question, but I do know that 
precache2.php has a memory leak on 4.10. As can bee seen here:

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
16754 swoodbri  25   0 4707m 4.5g 6604 R   99 57.5  10945:39 php
26651 swoodbri  25   0  601m 483m 6540 R   98  6.1   3444:00 php

These two processes started out around 91M or less. I estimate that they 
are leaking in the ball park of about 6M per metatile.

I have not had a chance to try and run this under the current trunk. If 
I do get a chance to build and test that I will run it under valgrind 
and file a ticket on it in needed.

This is running on Suse and is running from the CLI on PHP5.

I have already discussed this with Daniel off list.

-Steve W