php zend_extension getting ignored when self-compiling php

Question

I am trying to load Zend Optimizer into my self-compiled php.

Here is how i compile my php:

wget http://museum.php.net/php5/php-5.2.6.tar.gz
tar xvfz php-5.2.6.tar.gz
cd php-5.2.6
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php --with-apxs2=/usr/bin/apxs2 --with-config-file-path=/etc/php5/apache2 --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php5/apache2/conf.d
make install

However, the zend_extension directive in php.ini is getting completely ignored. If I use a non-existent path i still don't even get a error message. When using a pre-compiled php library everything is working fine.

In php.ini I also set

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
display_startup_errors = On
log_errors = On
error_log = /var/log/php_errors.log

error_log = /var/log/php_errors.log is only getting written when a error in a php-file occurs.

In apache.conf i set

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
LogLevel debug

I also tried compiling with --disable-maintainer-zts --disable-safe-mode which was mentioned on another website. I choose php-5.2.6 because it is the version of the (working) pre-compiled php, but i also tried php-version 5.2.16.

Answer 1

The Solution:

According to the Zend Optimizer user guide

The Zend Optimizer will not run if the following PHP settings are enabled:

• Debug Mode - Check that your PHP was compiled in non-debug mode - This can be checked by looking at the top part of the phpinfo() function output and checking "Debug Build" row (ZEND_DEBUG in older PHP versions) - it should say "no".
• Thread Safety - Check that your PHP was compiled in ZTS mode for Windows and non-ZTS mode for UNIX. This can be checked by looking at the top part of the phpinfo() function and checking "Thread Safety" row - it should say "disabled" for Unix and "enabled" for Windows.
• Enable Versioning - Check that your PHP was compiled without the Enable Versioning setting. This can be checked by looking at the top part of the phpinfo() function and checking to see if a row called "--enable-versioning" exists in the Configure Command section - if it does exists the PHP should be compiled without this option.

The configure options --disable-zts and --disable-maintainer-zts (which should turn of Thread Safety mode) do NOT exist in PHP 5.2.x

You can control the Thread-Safety mode by doing the following:

I found it, it was because installing apache2-dev package on my system (Ubuntu) automatically installs apache2-thread-dev whose apxs2 tells the PHP build system to build with thread-safety on. Therefore, the solution was to directly install apache2-prefork-dev package. (Credits for this go to amr-mostafa)

The behavior described above does also apply to debian. So removing apache-tread-dev and installing apache2-prefork-dev did the deal!