Apologies if this is too off topic. My problem is not directly related to nginx.

We've been running nginx + spawn-fcgi for 6 months without any issues. Until one morning I come in and all our sites are down because there were no php-cgi processes running. Obviously I'm keen to not have this happen again. I could make use of something like monit to monitor the php-cgi processes, but even a few minutes down time (waiting for a monit cycle) is not good.

The only article on this I've been able to find so far is this one: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-stop-crashing-hanging-of-php-cgi-spawn-fcgi-with-nginx-lighttpd/

As this is a popular combo with nginx, I was wondering if anyone here had any advice, or even just some more articles for me to RTFM?

Thanks.