The Bugs Were Our Own Linker Wraps: Making a PHP Timeout Actually Time Out

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:35:00 -0700

In the stack guard post the villain was a -Wl,--wrap linker flag that turned off PHP’s C-stack overflow guard. It wasn’t the only one. Until August, max_execution_time did nothing in ePHPm on Linux, for the same reason. We had wrapped the function that arms it to a no-op. A runaway script ran until the HTTP layer’s request timeout gave up on it and sent a 504. The PHP thread kept burning CPU after that.

libxml2 2.14 Broke PHP Windows Builds - And Nobody Noticed

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:36:00 -0700

Back in April I was getting the embed SAPI building on Windows for ePHPm. I was using my fork of static-php-cli (SPC). The link step for php8ts.dll fell over with a wall of errors that all looked like this:

php8ts.dll.def : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol UTF8ToHtml
php8ts.dll.def : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol UTF8Toisolat1
php8ts.dll.def : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __htmlDefaultSAXHandler
...
php8ts.dll.def : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol attributeDecl
...

(That excerpt is from php/php-src#22752. It’s the same failure someone else hit three months later. My log is long gone, and theirs is public.)

Linker on Luther Monson

The Bugs Were Our Own Linker Wraps: Making a PHP Timeout Actually Time Out

libxml2 2.14 Broke PHP Windows Builds - And Nobody Noticed