I have this problem too -- with my project, the server right at once uses 100% CPU and memory increases dramatically. During this time, it stops responding to requests. Monit notices this and just restarts it. This happens for me roughly every half-an-hour under very high load.

I'm using JSON parsing but not much else. No dependencies / libraries at all. Are there any steps I can take to provide useful data? Would anyone like me to run it with --prof and hammer it with 'ab' for example?

Here's the code: http://github.com/gcr/goggles