title: session_start hangs
body: <p>since a few hours our server hangs every time you do a session_start.</p>
  
  <p>For testing purposes i created a script which looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php
  session_start();
  ?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Calling it from the console hangs and it can't even be stopped with ctrl-c, only kill -9 works. The same for calling it via Apache. <code>/var/lib/php/session/</code> stays empty but permissions are absolutely fine, www can write and also has read permissions for all parent folders.</p>
  
  <p>According to the admins there were no changes made on the server and there is no special code registered for sessions. The Server is CentOS 4 or 5 and yesterday everything was working perfectly. We rebooted the server and updated PHP, but nothing changed.</p>
  
  <p>I've ran out of ideas, any suggestions?</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong></p>
  
  <p>We solved this problem by moving the project to another server, so while the problem still exists on one server there is no immediate need for a solution anymore.
  I will keep the question open in case someone has an idea for others having a similar problem in the future, though.</p>