I have a Drupal 6 site that is frequently (about once a day) going down. The hosting provider is reporting that something in our site code is occupying all Apache threads but keeping them idle, making the server run out of threads to respond to new requests. A simple restart of Apache frees the threads and fixes the issue, though it reoccurs within a few hours or a day.
I have no idea how to troubleshoot this issue and have never come across PHP code doing this. Is there some kind of Apache settings change I can make to capture more information about what might be keeping a thread occupied but idle? What typical PHP routines can cause this behavior? I looked for code that connects to external resources, but didn't see any issues there.
Any hints for what to look at, capture more information, or PHP code that can cause this would be most useful.