[SOLVED] XAMPP: Another web server daemon is already running?

Issue

I have painfully analyzed all of yesterday if I had another apache/web-server instance running, with all of these commands

ps aux
ps -e
lsof 
netstat tunap

I DO NOT have another instance of Apache or ANY OTHER server running at port 8080.

Yet, XAMPP gives me this:

XAMPP: Another web server daemon is already running

What should I do?

I also edited httpd.conf to LISTEN to port 9876, and still the same.

Solution

If:

lsof -Pi |grep 8080        returns no results
netstat -na |grep 8080     returns no results
ps -ef                     shows no web server processes

Then maybe there's a lockfile lying around that the startup is checking against? Those are typically found under /var/run but don't necessarily have to. At this point I would usually run strace to see what's going on:

strace -e read=all -e write=all -f -o strace.out your_startup_command

Then open up strace.out, search for the "..is already running" string in the output, and starting looking at lines above it to see what is failing.

Answered By - gunglefunk

Answer Checked By - Senaida (WPSolving Volunteer)