i managed to fix this issue but i wanted to document it here for any others whom might have similar problems.
I'm running a mediatemple (dv) rage server. monit started sending me alerts that i was having resource limitations on the server. logged into plesk and the CPU was pinned at 99.9%. Rebooted the server, catastrophe avoided...
Not quite - all my rails apps were not loading
My Setup ruby 1.8.6 Rails 2.3.5 w/ passenger installed as an apache module.
I noticed a defunct ruby process so i killed and rebooted the server but runby continued to come back as defunct. Started trolling thru the apache log and i saw errors irt updating rubygems. i updated to the latest but then continued to get gem errors. Basically, I had to go thru all my apps and update any gems manually, reboot apache, and all was restored.
Not really sure the cause of the issue but wanted to note it for posterity. Anybody else in the community ever have similar issues???