PHP 5.3 Upgrade Breaks a lot of applications

but why?

[brokaddr]

I have been reading mixed stories about issues/success stories in upgrading from 5.2.x to 5.3

I understand the deprecated issues, but when I tried to upgrade my server, I hit a slew of 500 errors & segmentation faults. The log errors are non-specific.

I can do a raw query to the database via PHP with success. However, my actual website is essentially broken.

This absolutely has to be related to some sort of bug/conflict with my code; but if I can find the bug I can fix my scripts to be compatible.

Any tips on how I can troubleshoot the cause?

[enigma1]

The last time I tried the 5.3 few weeks ago, it wouldn't work because there were missing files from the package. Complementing files from 5.2 made matters worse and started seeing application errors reported by the os kernel. The PHP install process was reporting success.

I don't know if they rectified these issues but I had to keep 5.2 on the server.

[brokaddr]

What type of application errors did you get?

[enigma1]

I was getting errors from the O/S once I tried to restart the apache server. They were exceptions from the application. I do not have the details as I removed it since then and used the 5.2.

[brokaddr]

I didn't even restart the server after 5.3 install; the errors arrived instantaneously right after php was finished compiling.
During trial & error tests I did attempt a restart of apache process; same results:

Segfaults in messages log.
"Premature end of Headers: php5" in httpd logs. Neither of which are particularly useful for troubleshooting code - they don't tell you anything aside from 'there was a problem'.