The archiving process, or namely, the asynchronous support, tends to fail on platforms with multiple installed PHP versions. This is a common practice on shared hosts, but it makes running PHP via command line much more difficult.

The main issues are twofold:

• Piwik\CliMulti::findPhpBinary() locates the wrong PHP runtime and attempts to run the archiving script on too old PHP version.
• Even if correct runtime is located, it may not necessarily run using the correct php.ini

These issues are particularly problematic on web crons, since the web cron can fail completely when, for example, it tries to run the Piwik script using PHP version prior to 5.3 (due to lack of namespace support).

Running core:arhive via CLI allows these to be somewhat avoided by using PHPRC environment variable to define the php.ini location and by running the console script using correct PHP version.

I'd imagine easiest way to avoid these problems could be allowing configuration of the PHP binary and location of the php.ini or simply by making it possible to manually disable asynchronous archiving.