I had some hassle figuring out this but I found that CSS aggregation on my server killed Apache process with no message in logs.
I isolated the problem and found that css_optimization regex in Drupal core crashes on Win32 system due to large comment blocks in these files:

  • html-elements.css
  • zen.css
  • layout-liquid.css
  • layout-fixed.css

After some research I've found a complete report here: http://www.mail-archive.com/php-bugs@lists.php.net/msg128459.html
Here is the explanation of why this happens: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=25754

As there is no way for this to be solved in PHP, even if this is a not so frequent case, my advice is to rewrite comments in that CSSes so that this bug doesn't trigger.
Another way is to implement an option in Zen so that it could strip the comments out by itself on CSS load with an ereg_replace instead of preg_replace (but I really don't know if this is possible in Drupal).

I'd be glad to contribute with test and coding but I'm not so accustomed with Drupal developing so I'd need help from some senior developer.

Comments

johnalbin’s picture

johnalbin
they/他
Primary language English
Location Taipei, Taiwan
commented
Version: 6.x-1.1 » 6.x-1.x-dev
Component: CSS/HTML Markup » layout.css
Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

Which comments?

barraponto’s picture

barraponto
he / him
commented

There is a comment in the php bug report that attributes the issue to Apache's memory limit.
Although this is a crappy PHP limitation, nonetheless.

I believe we can get away with this once we get Compass into Zen (the comments will live only in the .scss version, CSS can already be output without comments).

It shouldn't bother regular Drupal users since CSS is processed once and then cached.

johnalbin’s picture

johnalbin
they/他
Primary language English
Location Taipei, Taiwan
commented
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Closed (fixed)

Closing old bug reports.