Symfony2 fails in production

Question

We deployed our first Symfony2 website in production this week.

Strange things started to happen with it on server but we could not able reproduce the problem locally. We tested on other servers and caught the same errors too. If it helps we tried ubuntu ami on amazon ec2 and debian on other server. Also both apache2+mod_php and nginx+php-fpm, php version is 5.3.3. Symfony is 2.0.9.

Some requests just returns blank screen and in error logs appears following errors:

[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/ClassLoader/ApcUniversalClassLoader.php on line 80
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 1152
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 1146
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 464
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 465
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 466
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 666
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 467
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 468
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 469
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/ParameterBag.php on line 34
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Request.php on line 123
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/ParameterBag.php on line 34
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Request.php on line 124
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/ParameterBag.php on line 34
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Request.php on line 125
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/ParameterBag.php on line 34
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Request.php on line 126
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/FileBag.php on line 48
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Request.php on line 127
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/ParameterBag.php on line 34
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Warning:  Attempt to assign property of non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Request.php on line 128
[Sun Feb 12 17:09:30 2012] [error] [client 192.168.51.125] PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function getHeaders() on a non-object in /var/www/itop/vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/Request.php on line 129

We are really stuck trying to find out the problem Has anybody else got this kind of problems? Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

In my experience, when you have strange errors like this, particularly when you see random "non-object" issues in non-sensical places, the issue is always memory. Quite literally, an object is being created, but then that object is lost in memory, so by the next line, it's no longer an object. I've seen this only a few times, but it has always been related to a problem with APC. In fact, at my last job, we had a similar issue after upgrading to PHP 5.3 - it would work most of the time, but then APC would eventually run out of memory and we would get these errors. At the time (about a year ago), it seemed (from googling) that there were some issues in some cases with PHP and APC. I would definitely look into APC - I really think it's your problem. Specifically, APC is not flushing its old memory to make room for new things.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Ok, I think we found the solution to this problem. Strange errors disappeared when we upgraded php on our server to the latest version: 5.3.10. It was that easy. May be it was some bugs of php 5.3.3, I don't know. And we haven't found anything related in changelogs.

This weekend we'll test another machine with freebsd and 5.3.8.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help.