That's great if strace et. al. can actually tell you why production is misbehaving. Of course, strace doesn't exist in vacuum, it changes the way your code exec

That's great if strace et. al. can actually tell you why production is misbehaving. Of course, strace doesn't exist in vacuum, it changes the way your code executes. Everything is going to be slower, and race conditions and locks may not present themselves so readily. Then you also have the added stress of screwing around with a live server, what if you do something that messes it up worse? Sometimes it makes more sense just to kill that server and add a fresh one to the pool. Better yet if that process is automated. Good logging can actually be more valuable than mucking about in the live environment (or as I call it, panic mode).