Anybody got a clue on how to troubleshoot this issue? It seems after this error the apache child thread goes into segmentation fault causing some user downloads to finish prematurely.

Am using PHP 5.2.6 + Apache 2.2.3 on CentOS 5.2

TIA

If you search the web for this error and start reading you'll notice that this is an ongoing issue with various PHP/Apache combinations.

What I can suggest is do a binary isolation, as you have mentioned your PHP version does not come as an approved CentOS 5.2 version so somehwre along the way an OS library that PHP depends to is the culprit.

Try disabling unneeded PHP extensions, it's good if you have an identical machine to do this.

We have had a number of occurrences like this and this method has worked 100% of the time although we were not able to specifically pinpoint which PHP/Apache module is the culprit as they differed in versions.

Thanks SW, so far what we have done was upgrade Apache to the latest stable version. The zend_mm_heap corrupted error went away however we are still seeing segmentation faults. I guess I should isolate between PHP extensions and Apache modules. Right now we only have loaded what is really needed and still experiencing segfaults. Hopefully we nag this down soon.

Upgrading PHP to the latest 5.2.9 stable branch resolves the memory leak, looks like there was really a problem with one of the extensions.