SegFault with PHP or PEAR::SOAP

List, Does anyone know how to attach a debugger to a running process? I've got this fun PHP script that uses PEAR::SOAP to interact with another database my company has. The "other" database (which is being phased out) is M$-SQL 2000. To get to the Database I wrote a simple SOAP page on an IIS server which allows me to execute SQL statements aginst the DB. I've got to import some records from the DB, so I make a query. There are 2659 records to import. That was too many for either PHP/PEAR::SOAP or IIS to handle and the query would fail, if I tried to grab them all. So I did it by month, and get this: Requesting 1/2003...550 items Requesting 2/2003...500 items Requesting 3/2003...623 items Requesting 4/2003...326 items Requesting 5/2003...160 items Requesting 6/2003...140 items Requesting 7/2003...118 items Requesting 8/2003...143 items Requesting 9/2003...94 items Requesting 10/2003...48 items Requesting 11/2003...26 items Requesting 12/2003...1 items Requesting 1/2004...1 items [ Now I've seen many error messages] [ One ] Requesting 2/2004...Segementation Fault [ Two ] Requesting 2/2004... Notice: Undefined property: _debug in /usr/local/lib/php/PEAR.php on line 143 Notice: Undefined property: fault in /usr/local/lib/php/SOAP/Client.php on line 223 Fatal error: Call to undefined function: send() in /usr/local/lib/php/SOAP/Client.php on line 228 Segmentation fault [ Three ] Requesting 2/2004...FATAL: emalloc(): Unable to allocate 908996661 bytes Look what TOP says (SIZE!, %MEM!): PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 30118 root 19 0 78836 76M 2004 R 9.1 30.7 0:53 import-items-f The response for 2/2004 has one item in it, but why does it segfault? I'd post the code but I'm concerned about showing any info about my datbases, I'll see what I can do. In the mean time, I've watched the wire and nothing seems out of the ordinary as far as what is transfering, all nicely formed XML. I notice that the script continues to consume memory, even though I unset() both the soap client, and the response. What I'm saying is that I create a new SOAP/Client for each iteration of the loop (36 iterations). Shouldn't memory be freed? The script consumes lots of memory at the time of the SegFault. Heres where it gets even better, if I cut out the first year (2003), the script runs fine for the next 24 iterations, so it seems like either unset() or SOAP/Client is not letting go of something? At the end of each loop I do ($sc is client, $items is response): $items = $sc->call('exec_sql', $params, $options); $c = count($items); echo "$c items\r\n"; unset ($sc); unset ($items); Shouldn't that free up some memory? Doesn't look like it is. Workaround: a BASH script that calls the PHP script with a year parameter is my solution, call the script with the year, do one iteration for each month, exit (free memory), call script again for next year. I know there are other ways to do this, but this way is more fun. I would like to know why the SegFault though. TIA David Busby Systems Engineer busby@pnts.com