I am using WAMPServer on a windows10 machine.
I wrote a PHP program to perform various operations on an XML DOM using DOMDocument.

It works on most files, but then I sometimes encounter one file which will trigger this silent crashing of Apache, with the following error message in the error log:
AH00428: Parent: child process 102472 exited with status 3221226356 -- Restarting.

I have scoured the Web and tried every solution proposed (upping the ThreadStackSize or the number of threads, moving dlls around, deactivating various php modules, upping the memory allocated, etc.) but nothing changes. With various “unsignificant” code changes, I can get the error to occur unexpectedly sooner of later in the script execution, but that’s about it.

I even know what triggers it. I have a function stack the eventually tries to access a $domElement->previousSibling to perform some modifications on it and that’s what crashes Apache. I can’t really bypass it because it is central to the program’s function.

So I’m left wondering, is it my dev environment that sucks or something else?

(Running: WAMP 3.3.0 64 bit; Apache 2.4.54.2; PHP 8.0.26 [newer versions don’t make a difference])