I’ve upgraded this server to PHP 5.2.0 using the Debian Backports repository, please post a comment or email me (send it to chris at this domain) if you spot any problems!
First impressions are very good, I’ve not been bitten by these WordPress problems (yet) and memory usage seems a hell of a lot better than 5.1. The only wrinkle is that I had to increase memory_limit to 128M to get posting articles to work, but whereas before that would have killed the system completely it seems OK for now..
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One thing to watch out for is PHP bug #39438 which is a memory handling bug, in Debian it is bug 402506, which can cause some WordPress actions (such as submitting a new story) and some Typo3 actions (such as updating your cached list of official extensions from the central repository) to error out with a message that it cannot allocate enough RAM.
Fortunately the PHP folks have a fix in SVN and there is now a set of testing packages with this fix committed which I’m now running here – and the problem seems to have gone away.
Yay, the bug fix for Debian bug 402506 is now rolled into 5.2.0-8.
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgradeis your friend. 🙂