APACHE Crashing: Parent: child process exited with status 3221225477 — Restarting

Question

My following setup is Xampp 1.7.7 and here is the info for everything in that package: - Apache/2.2.21 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.21 OpenSSL/1.0.0e PHP/5.3.8 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5

Answer 1

The error code 3221225477 is 0xC0000005 in hex, which on Windows is:

#define STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION  ((NTSTATUS)0xC0000005L)

Access violation is Windows' version of "segmentation fault", which simply said means that the program tried to access a memory which is not allocated. This can happen for a lot of different reasons, but mostly (if not always) is a bug in the program.

Now, my guess for your situation, is that there is either a bug in PHP or in one of PHP's extensions or in Perl or some Perl application. Apache itself is usually very stable, but if you use some unusual extension, it might be the cause, too.

I would suggest updating all your configuration to latest versions. If you want to find the source of the problem for sure, run Apache inside a debugger, like Visual Studio or OllyDbg. When the exception (access violation) happens, it will stop execution (instead of restarting) and you'll see in which module it is.

Also take a look in the access log, if there is a suspicious request with the same timestamp as the error. But it may happen that the crash happens before the request is saved in the logfile.