They won't like the idea of taking anything down ^^, but if that would help sovling the problem, taking down a single machine from the farm for several minutes should be ok. I will give it a shot so next time if anything similar show up, I will have some thing to study.
I've no idea what stability impact the profiler would have. It does impact CPU usage and memory consumption, it also generates potentially very large log files if it's running for any significant amount of time. You also have to shut the server down to finalise the profile logs (otherwise they tend to be difficult it not impossible to use). I don't have any stats on exactly how much the profiler overhead is (does anyone?)
So I'd be very leary of using the profiler in production, especially if you have a high traffic site. If you have a situation that's not at all reproduceable in your testing environment, and you have a live environment where you can swap a webserver in and out of the configuration easily (or it doesn't matter if the server is down for a few minutes), then you might attempt it with caution, but you'd have to watch it - I certainly wouldn't leave it running by itself.
Depending on your situation, the idea may give your collegues or manager fits. I'm working in situations where the server being down for five minutes wouldn't bother anyone much. That's probably a relatively rare occurance in a commerical situation.
Many thanks for the tips Malcolm.
Tor.
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