Debugging the WhiteScreenOfDeath -- a maze of twisty little passages...
 

So...
I have a Fedora 10 server that hosts a webserver who's content is managed by Drupal. Suddenly this week-end I began experiencing the dreaded WhiteScreenOfDeath

First I thought, it's something with the Drupal 6 code, but then I got the same behavior from a Bugzilla installation that co-resides there.

browsing the logs I found:
.../httpd/error_log
[Tue Sep 08 10:00:18 2009] [notice] child pid 10182 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 08 10:00:32 2009] [notice] child pid 10481 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 08 11:00:17 2009] [notice] child pid 10542 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 08 11:00:31 2009] [notice] child pid 10536 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 08 11:02:59 2009] [notice] child pid 10301 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 08 11:36:30 2009] [notice] child pid 10730 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 08 12:00:19 2009] [notice] child pid 10728 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

corresponding to my browsing attempts...

I'm running
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
fedora | 2.8 kB 00:00
updates | 3.4 kB 00:00
Installed Packages
Name : httpd
Arch : i386
Version : 2.2.11
Release : 2.fc10
Size : 2.7 M
Repo : installed
From repo : updates
Summary : Apache HTTP Server
URL : http://httpd.apache.org/
License : ASL 2.0
Description: The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful, efficient, and extensible
: web server.

I'm hoping that you fellow netizens can help me get to the bottom of this
First question: what can I turn on to find out what is killing my httpd children.

Ideas to try to figure out what exactly is dying.
 

Can you correlate the time in the error log with events in the other http logs?

Are there any core files laying around anywhere? (Especially anything with a date similar to the time of failure)

Can you run httpd from the command line and make its output go to stdout?

Rusty

I set up httpd to drop core files in /tmp/apachecore
but nobody showed up
I think there is a loop of some kind that I created while trying to create a calendar using feeds from event creation in another segment of the code. It feeds until it explodes...
I started over with a fresh install and I'm slowly adding the content back in from the old database using mysql
it's tricky merging the old stuff with the current database.

I don't remember trying to run httpd from the command line...I'll give that a try when I get another non-production server in place to debug this problem.