Stuck with PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL or even CentOS (and a sysadmin who insists on using packages)? Need JSON? I did. The solution is easy:
yum install php-devel<br /> pecl install json
The pecl install failed when it hit an 8MB memory limit, and I was clueless about how to fix it until I learned that the pecl installer ignores the php.ini. Turns out the best solution is to use the pear installer (which does follow php.ini settings):
pear install pecl/json