Joomla! php, FastCGI, blank page and duplicate header ‘Status’

Since months, now I (understand also YOU) receive some blank page when browsing my Internet homepage.

This strange behavior seems to occur only when having PHP running as FastCGI

FastCGI is a protocol for interfacing interactive programs with a web server. FastCGI is a variation on the earlier Common Gateway Interface (CGI); FastCGI’s main aim is to reduce the overhead associated with interfacing the web server and CGI programs, allowing a server to handle more web page requests at once. [WikiPedia]

The Apache logs are quite explicit:

[error] [client x.x.x.x] FastCGI: comm with server “/srv/www/cgi-bin/php5” aborted: error parsing headers: duplicate header ‘Status’

The error is located in the file /libraries/joomla/environment/response.php, at the function JResponse::sendHeaders()

The way header has to be send is different when using PHP FastCgi, strange that #Joomla! 1.5.9 still do not have this in main stream code…

Old code

 function sendHeadersOld()  {   if (!headers_sent())   {    foreach ($GLOBALS['_JRESPONSE']->headers as $header)    {     if ('status' == strtolower($header['name']))     {      // 'status' headers indicate an HTTP status, and need to be handled 

     // slightly differently      header(ucfirst(strtolower($header['name'])) . ': ' . $header['value'], null, 
     (int) $header['value']);     } else {      header($header['name'] . ': ' . $header['value']);     }    }   }  }

This is how it should look like, code is backward compatible, if PHP run as an apache module.

 function sendHeaders()  {   if (!headers_sent())   {    foreach ($GLOBALS['_JRESPONSE']->headers as $header)    {     if ('status' == strtolower($header['name']))     {      // 'status' headers indicate an HTTP status, and need to be handled 
     // slightly differently      $attribute = ucfirst(strtolower($header['name'])) . ': ' . $header['value'];            if (substr(php_sapi_name(), 0, 8) == 'cgi-fcgi') {        $attribute = str_replace("Status:", "HTTP/1.1", $attribute);      }      header($attribute, null, (int) $header['value']);     } else {      header($header['name'] . ': ' . $header['value']);     }    }   }  }