Smarty

[CrazyTemplate]

I have a strange problem and I'd appreciate some help.

I'm using a Smarty template, which loops on a multi-dimensional array and returns a large (50+) set of tables in HTML format.

Everything seems to work, but one out of 5 requests, the user is returned with a blank page. The apache error log shows the following error: End of script output before headers. Unfortunately, there are no PHP errors reported, nothing in the error_log.

After some tracing, I found out that the PHP script dies at the very last command, which is: $smarty->display('search.html');

Since there are no errors reported by Smarty, or PHP, I can't really trace the problem to the offending code.

I know this is not due to a memory error, since I've raised the PHP memory limit to several gigs and I've also enabled the error_log reporting, which works for regular PHP and Smarty errors (just not in this case).

So what would cause the PHP/Smarty process to die without any errors, on a script that otherwise works fine for smaller data sets?

Please help.

Thank you.


PS:
I did manage to figure out, that the problem is in a single line, which contains two {if} statements, one {foreach} and some isset() calls to an array with 2000 records (strings of company names). Probably something breaks when accessing the large array with isset(). I re-wrote the code into more lines and now the Smarty display() process does not die.