How do you define "spontaneously dies"?
I have many sites running 3.3+ad13 and all of the busy ones have a tendency to freeze. All the nsd threads are still running, but they stop serving pages. No errors in the error log but I have noticed that very often (but not always) the last thing in the log is the ns_log statement announcing the end of a scheduled proc. Which would be consistent with what Danny is reporting.
It only happens on busy sites. I have several sites where the staging and live sites share the same database, so there are two sets of scheduled procs running. Only the live sites freeze. So it's not *just* the procs - it's the procs in combination with nsd serving other pages at the same time.
All of our sites that do this use Oracle, not Postgres, since our Oracle sites are the bigger, busier ones. However, I'm not surprised to see that Danny is running Postgres; this doesn't strike me as a database related problem.
I can't shed any more light on this, unfortunately - since these are live sites I can't take the time to do any debugging, I have to restart them right away. I can say, from the few times when things have not gotten restarted as quickly as they should have, that it doesn't seem to resolve itself with time. Once nsd loses it's mind, it's gone forever.
