**** the script
$data[1][a] = 1;

$data = &$data[1];    // crashes here without --enable-debug

print_r($data);       // crashes here with --enable-debug


**** the system
Suse Linux 7.1
Linux camouflage 2.4.5 #8 Tue Jun 26 17:05:34 CEST 2001 i686 unknown
Server Version: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.1.1 mod_backhand/1.2.1


**** PHP configuration
./configure \
  --without-mysql \
  --with-sybase-ct=/opt/sybase/ \
  --with-apxs=/opt/apache/bin/apxs \
  --enable-debug
 

**** apache error-log 
FATAL:  erealloc():  Unable to allocate 1515872257 bytes (only with --enable-debug)
[Sun Jan 13 19:05:30 2002] [notice] child pid 5198 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)                                      


**** backtrace
unfortunately I can't get a backtrace of the apache


**** description
for a long time we run a quite complex web application with php up to version 4.0.6 without problems. With php 4.1.1 all constructions trying to reduce the depth of a large array by assigning a reference to itself let apache crash. While debugging this problem I discovered a very short and easy script to reproduce the crash. It's somewhat strage that the short script also crashes with php 4.0.6. Anyway, removing all constructions like $array = &$array[index] from all our scripts fixed the problem for our web application.