Facebook pummeled us and our servers. One of our customers updated their facebook page with an image and a link. wham...

Doesn't help when Facebook does a continuous request to a CMS that will happily comply.

I had multiple apache instances about 2GB process size... but Apache couldn't/wouldn't kill it as it was still serving... no break and the CMS/modperl was just a churning... and churning... spinning.

Manual kills were the only option. It sucked... had to reboot one of the webservers as I didn't catch it in time ... and was out of memory and swap and was flailing at 200 load average trying to spawn new instances.... *BOOP* reset button.

Guess I'll have to run a cronjob that runs every 20 seconds and hammers the runaways... already do it on old versions of the CMS... guess I'll have to do it on the new(er) version.