Php-fpm: locale settings change themselves

fastcgiPHPphp-fpm

I experienced a bug with php-fpm : locale settings change themselves randomly.

Here are the correct locale settings:

Array
(
    [decimal_point] => .
    [thousands_sep] => 
    [int_curr_symbol] => 
    [currency_symbol] => 
    [mon_decimal_point] => 
    [mon_thousands_sep] => 
    [positive_sign] => 
    [negative_sign] => 
    [int_frac_digits] => 127
    [frac_digits] => 127
    [p_cs_precedes] => 127
    [p_sep_by_space] => 127
    [n_cs_precedes] => 127
    [n_sep_by_space] => 127
    [p_sign_posn] => 127
    [n_sign_posn] => 127
    [grouping] => Array
        (
        )
    [mon_grouping] => Array
        (
        )
)

And here are the changed settings:

Array
(
    [decimal_point] => ,
    [thousands_sep] =>  
    [int_curr_symbol] => EUR 
    [currency_symbol] => €
    [mon_decimal_point] => ,
    [mon_thousands_sep] =>  
    [positive_sign] => 
    [negative_sign] => -
    [int_frac_digits] => 2
    [frac_digits] => 2
    [p_cs_precedes] => 0
    [p_sep_by_space] => 1
    [n_cs_precedes] => 0
    [n_sep_by_space] => 1
    [p_sign_posn] => 1
    [n_sign_posn] => 1
    [grouping] => Array
        (
            [0] => 3
        )
    [mon_grouping] => Array
        (
            [0] => 3
        )
)

The problem occurs randomly.

When removing php-fpm and using FastCGI, the problem doesn't occur anymore. How can I get this working with php-fpm ? The problem occurs on a shared hosting (we are the company which provides the hosting) and we really need php-fpm in order to use pools.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT :
Today I discovered the problem occurs when we use the Ondemand Process Manager and not with the Static Process Manager.

Best Answer

This strong warning in the PHP documentation explains the problem:

Warning The locale information is maintained per process, not per thread. If you are running PHP on a multithreaded server API like IIS, HHVM or Apache on Windows, you may experience sudden changes in locale settings while a script is running, though the script itself never called setlocale(). This happens due to other scripts running in different threads of the same process at the same time, changing the process-wide locale using setlocale().

You don't see this in a FastCGI setup because a new process is spawned for every page load. But in php-fpm a pool of processes is maintained indefinitely.

To resolve the problem, ideally each customer should have their own php-fpm pool. Then the customer is responsible for any applications they run which don't properly set the locale when they start up.

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