PHP sessions on R5k indy

[lists@koornneef.net (Leander Koornneef)]

Hi!

I spent quite some time figuring this one out and still don't know the
exact cause of the problem :(
I have an R5k 150MHz Indy with woody installed running as an apache-webserver (PHP4, MySQL, the
works...). Everything installed from debian-packages.

I installed horde-2.0 and imp-3.0 to provide a webmail-client for my
mail-users. These new versions of Horde and IMP use the built-in session handling of PHP4 
instead of PHPLIB, which was used in previous versions. I suspect there
is a MIPS-specific problem with this, when the session handling is set to
file-based (i.e. they don't work on my indy
:-) )

There is a test-script that comes with horde-2.0 that does the
following:

------------
<snip>
if (!isset($HTTP_SESSION_VARS['horde_test_count'])) {
	$horde_test_count = 0;
	session_register('horde_test_count');
}

$horde_test_count = &$HTTP_SESSION_VARS['horde_test_count'];
<snip>
-----------

This creates a session file in PHP's tmp-directory (/tmp/php in my case, with
correct permission etc.).

-----------
ibb0009:/tmp# cat sess_5bfa5fa2530928a74e304bb435c448d8
horde_test_count|i:1;
----------

If the page is refreshed, the count number should go up by one, and this
does not happen on the Indy. I set up an i386 test-box (pentium 90MHz,
woody installed with same versions of apache and PHP). This works like a
charm.....

I solved the problem on the indy by using shared-memory based
session-handling (i.e. by setting 'session.save_handler = mm' in php.ini).
I am very curious why the file-based session don't work, but I don't have a clue :(

I'll send a copy of this email to the maintainer of the PHP package.
(In the meanwhile, I found that this problem also occurs on ppc and sparc (bug #121391))

Regards,

Leander