Topic: Crashes in libhttpd.dll with 2.4.69

[mikejs]

Hi,

I have a few windows servers that run Apache, some with PHP (8.5.11).

All has been working fine for many versions, but with the 2.4.69 release we're having problems.

The service starts, but once it receives a request, it crashes in libhttpd.dll.

These crashes result in this repeating error in the error.log:

[Fri Oct 02 13:45:55.228043 2026] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 1632:tid 340] AH00455: Apache/2.4.69 (Win64) OpenSSL/3.5.9 configured -- resuming normal operations
[Fri Oct 02 13:45:55.228043 2026] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 1632:tid 340] AH00456: Apache Lounge VS18 Server built: Oct 1 2026 09:34:06
[Fri Oct 02 13:45:55.228043 2026] [core:notice] [pid 1632:tid 340] AH00094: Command line: 'C:\\Apache24\\bin\\httpd.exe -d C:/Apache24'
[Fri Oct 02 13:45:55.228043 2026] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 1632:tid 340] AH00418: Parent: Created child process 4824
[Fri Oct 02 13:45:55.821707 2026] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 4824:tid 360] AH00354: Child: Starting 150 worker threads.
[Fri Oct 02 13:45:58.102990 2026] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 1632:tid 340] AH00428: Parent: child process 4824 exited with status 3221225477 -- Restarting.


A single request causes a cascade of these - I think 8 of them.


The key bit there being "exited with status 3221225477", which in hex is 0xC0000005, which is a pretty generic error. Difficult to know what it points to, and difficult to search on as there are a lot of posts about it, and clearly a lot of possible cases that result in that error.


At the same time you get crash details in Event Viewer:

Faulting application name: httpd.exe, version: 2.4.69.0, time stamp: 0x6abe0d7f
Faulting module name: libhttpd.dll, version: 2.4.69.0, time stamp: 0x6abe0cfa
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000001dbc8
Faulting process id: 0x15d8
Faulting application start time: 0x01dd5277c9dce2c9
Faulting application path: C:\Apache24\bin\httpd.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Apache24\bin\libhttpd.dll
Report Id: ff945d4d-434d-4985-83c7-ba7a4bb08e80
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Does the fault offset point to anything more specific?

Anything useful we can do with the resulting .dmp files?

Commenting out PHP from the config does not fix it.

Rolling everything back to 2.4.68 does fixes it, but clearly not a long term solution.

I started from scratch with the httpd.conf as supplied with 2.4.69 in case there were any differences there - same problem.

I've also experimented with mixing and matching, and found that having everything from 2.4.69, but copying the modules folder from from 2.4.68 works with no issues.

So it looks more like it's a 2.4.69 module rather than the main binaries themselves?

This is the list of modules we're loading, in order:

mod_access_compat
mod_allowmethods
mod_auth_basic
mod_authn_core
mod_authn_file
mod_authnz_ldap
mod_authz_core
mod_authz_groupfile
mod_authz_host
mod_authz_user
mod_socache_shmcb
mod_filter
mod_reqtimeout
mod_autoindex
mod_cgi
mod_mime
mod_ldap
mod_log_config
mod_alias
mod_dir
mod_env
mod_headers
mod_setenvif
mod_version

Anyone else seeing this kind of thing with 2.4.69?

Suggestions as to what to try next?

Thanks,

Mike

[Otomatic]

Hi,

# The ThreadStackSize directive sets the size of the stack (for autodata)
# of threads which handle client connections and call modules to help process
# those connections. In most cases the operating system default for stack size
# is reasonable, but there are some conditions where it may need to be adjusted.
# Apache httpd may crash when using some third-party modules which use a
# relatively large amount of autodata storage or automatically restart with
# message like: child process 12345 exited with status 3221225725 -- Restarting.
# This type of crash is resolved by setting ThreadStackSize to a value higher
# than the operating system default.
ThreadStackSize 8388608

[James Blond]

a 0xC0000005 is an access violation. How do you run your apache? As a service? What user is set in the service settings?

What do you see in the windows event log about this?