Ever wonder what it takes to crash PHP, well here is a quick guide ;-). Technically speaking PHP being a high level language should not crash, but reality speaks for itself. By knowing what could make PHP crash it may be possible to implement various safety mechanisms in your PHP configuration that would prevent users from crashing your PHP. This is quite important since a crash is not only a 'bad thing' [tm] in general but can also have several adverse affect on the web server potentially creating a possibility for a local DOS (Denial of Service). So without further ado here is the current crash list: Stack overflow. PHP does not have any internal stack protection choosing to rely upon the system stack without any protection. This means that if you have a recursive function or a method PHP will eventually crash. function a() { a(); } a(); There are 2 solutions to this problem, 1 avoid using recursive functions they are generally a bad idea anyway, and if you MUST use them implement some counter using...

Lately it seems that the possibility of PHP developers agreeing on something is about as likely as peace in the middle-east being declared overnight. After about a two week cease fire, following the long and bloody fight about studlyCaps aka suckyCaps, which ended with a sound defeat of the forces of sanity & reason the PHP developer community is at it again. Once more we can thank [url=http://coggeshall.org]John Coggeshall[/url] for this bit of entertainment, this time centered around wondrous PHP5 feature called "Exceptions". As you may or may not know in PHP5 it is possible to throw exceptions, which you can then catch and theoretically through this process simply error checking process and make it easier to write code. John proposed that all error messages raised by OO code would report errors by throwing exceptions rather then using the current error reporting mechanism. Technically the idea is sound good, since it would allow reduction in the number of error checks, allowing all error tracking be perfor...