getting php "ghost" errors - anyone else seen this?

rifk

I'm experiencing a problem in which "ghost" errors (for lack of a better term) are being displayed on my development server.

Here is what I mean by "ghost" error:

We have four developers, each with his own revision-controlled working directory. Occasionally, when one developer produces an error in his code in his working directory, the error will start randomly popping up in other developers' working web sites, even though the other developers' working web sites are not touching the code that the error is claiming to be triggered from.

The error will indicate that it's being caused by an unrelated page to the one being loaded, too. Our production server has done this as well, but it is extremely rare when it does happen on the production server. We suspect php or apache settings or code are to blame. A page refresh or two always gets rid of the "error", but we're hoping to avoid it altogether, as it has become very annoying.

Three relevant factors:
We're using php session handling.
Our development server is debian etch with php 5.2.0
We're using a custom error handler implemented by set_error_handler(). Our ghost errors are usually displayed through this. But the error handler does not store error messages for redisplay. Additionally, the error handler triggers an email send and a database insert or update, and when ghost messages display, neither of these occur.

Is it possible that something is corrupting apache or php caching or session handling? Anyone else seen anything like this?

Screen shot of "ghost" error:

dagon

check your error handler, as that's not the 'native' php error output your handler may be at fault.

rifk

dagon wrote:
check your error handler, as that's not the 'native' php error output your handler may be at fault.

We already tested this with bypassing our error handler altogether, but unfortunately the problem did not go away.

dagon

I would like to see a native php error msg. As the error handler does not work properly for these ghost errors (no email or logging) it really does sound like it is at fault

NogDog

Any error message coming from PHP is normally inserted directly into a script's standard output stream, so it's a bit hard for me to imagine how errors could be "floating around" on the host in some sort of independent manner. The only thing I can think of (outside of some really weird bug) would be if you are using some sort of server-side caching mechanism that is getting "confused".

rifk

dagon wrote:
I would like to see a native php error msg. As the error handler does not work properly for these ghost errors (no email or logging) it really does sound like it is at fault

Thanks for the idea dagon. I'm going to turn off our custom error handler and see if the native error handler can give me this error. Will post results...