Yes in our case this was the fact. There were two web servers, Apache 2 in our case, and one PHP. The php.ini file was in /etc/ as usual. Everything seemed to be perfect. But however some directives in php.ini does not worked for one of the server.

Why the second server does not read php.ini?

Well actually when you load the php.ini for the first server it loads correctly with everthing declared in it. However when you start the second server, of course on a different port than the first one, you get all the php.ini values as if they are default.

Why?

That’s some feature of PHP we didn’t know. I still don’t have an explanation about it. But of cource there’s a …

Workaround

You can put everything for the second server in the .htaccess file, so this will act as second php.ini for the second web server