As you’ve probably heard, wordpress.com was down today, which means ICanHasCheezburger, FailBlog and other related sites were down. Since my feed proxy script used for the iPhone app accesses those sites, it eventually ended up crashing my entire server.
A support person at Dreamhost explained:
Yeah, the issue was likely that your PHP scripts were hanging due to not
getting a response, which then caused the requests to build up and
overload the running PHP processes.