[chef] chef-server becoming nonresponsive

["Van Fossan,Randy" < >]

On our chef-server, I notice it seems to hang multiple times a day.
Clients timeout periodically, knife commands timeout and the webui is
inaccessible.   Sometimes, it will come back on it's own, sometimes I
have to shutdown and restart all the chef services.   I have been
looking through the log and thus far haven't been able to determine a
cause.  

I am compacting the database every day or so.  (I have to shutdown the
chef server to run the compaction otherwise couchdb will sometimes
crash.

Anyone have any ideas as to what / where I should be looking?    We only
have about 100 nodes, 50+ cookbooks and 20 or so roles..

Our current server is running centos 5.7,  couchdb 0.11.2,
rabbitmq-server 2.2.0, ruby 1.8.7, gems 1.8.10 and chef-server 0.10.8.
I have built a newer server, but haven't had the time to migrate.

Thanks
  Randy