php-fastcgi frozen/not responding after some time

Hi all,

I have Debian Squeeze with php 5.3.3-7+squeeze9 installed, running atop an nginx server.

For the past little while now, we've been experiencing intermittent website downtime due to the php process hanging. Whenever this happens, I need to log into root, and run "service php5-fastcgi restart" to spawn a new process.

In my php.ini, maxexecutiontime is set to 30, although there is a comment stating that using the CLI SAPI will ignore this parameter… so possibly my cronjob could be doing this.

Not knowing too much about server administration, but always willing to learn, I was wondering what commands I can invoke to see what exactly is going on with my server…!

At any rate, does anybody know where I can confirm my hypothesis?

Thanks!