Issue
On start up, the PHP child jobs will not start in Apache. Instead, the PHP parent job continually crashes and restarts. Joblogs for these jobs may show messages similar to this one: (or ZENDSVR6 for older versions)
If this is happening, it is important to shut down Apache quickly, as the joblogs will accumulate rapidly.
Environment
Zend Server for IBM i
Resolution
A common reason for a space offset error is some damage in a shared memory object. The reset function provided with Zend Server for IBM i will delete and recreate the shared memory objects, and can often resolve this issue. The following article tells how to do the reset:
Reset Zend Server for IBM i
If the reset fails to fix the issue, you can perform a clean install:
Perform a Clean Install of Zend Server for IBM i
There is almost nothing a clean install won't fix, including this issue.
Details
To determine if this is happening on your system, please display the QHTTPSVR subsystem active jobs:
Apache server instances that run PHP will have jobs similar to these (ZENDPHP7 is the default Apache instance for Zend Server 9.1.x, Zend Server 2018.x, Zend Server 2019.x. ZENDSVR6 is the default Apache instance for versions 6 - 8.5.x) configured for Zend Server, so that is the job name displayed here:
The first jobs that are running functions that start with 'Q' are Apache jobs. The job that runs zfcgi is the FastCGI gateway job that calls PHP. The first job running php-cgi.bi is the parent PHP job. The normal status for this job is THDW. The rest of the jobs running php-cgi.bi are the child PHP jobs.
If this issue is happening to you, there will not be any child jobs. The last job shown will be the parent. If you use F5 rapidly over and over, you will notice the parent job is constantly failing and respawning. If job logging is active for these jobs, you can look into the job log to see if the space offset error is there. If you are not getting job logs, you can set the logging levels for the FastCGI job (zfcgi) and those levels will be used in subsequent parent jobs that start up. Be careful, because these jobs are starting up rapidly, and you can quickly accumulate far too many job logs.