Debugging on Justin Carmony

PHP, Sessions, __sleep, and Exceptions

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:48:43 +0000

Today I ran into a problem where my PHP Application would throw this fatal error:

Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0

Which is so much fun, because it doesn’t have a line number, so I had no direction as to what exactly was causing the problem. Some quick googling came up with this website stating the following error:

Most often, the error will appear if you use an exception handler combined with an error reporting to exception handler by converting it to an ErrorException, then there a suddenly a whole new magnitude of ways to throw errors within the exception handle, especially if E_NOTICE, E_STRICT and/or E_WARNING errors are converted. This form most often occurs when you use variables without first initializing them. This error may be preventable by wrapping the exception handler within a try/catch block.

PHP, SoapClient, SoapServer, and Timeouts

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:50:58 +0000

I ran into an extremely frustrating problems while trying to add a test script for some PHP web services. I won’t go into detail on all the different things I went through to debug this problem. But here is what it all boiled down to:

Problem

I have a SOAP Web Service that extends PHP’s internal SoapServer class that serves hundreds of thousands of remote devices. Every now and then, our server will have a hiccup and our Web Service won’t return valid responses. However, nginx will return requests just fine. So, to monitor the Web Service, I wrote a PHP script using SoapClient to read the WSDL, make several SOAP calls, and make sure the responses are valid.

Debuging with PHP, Stack Traces, and Redis

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:22:56 +0000

A cool new trick I found with debugging pieces of code and how often they get executed. We were running into a problem where an expensive query was being called more frequently than I thought it should. This query was only found inside of a single member of a class. However, this class, which retrieves a user’s photo album, is used all over the place. So it was really hard to determine exactly where the unneeded queries being executed from.