Hear my words, and know them to be true:

"Adjust the unlabeled knob to the unmarked setting, then press the unspecified button an undocumented number of times. Fixes everything."

I’m only half-kidding. Sadly, it always seems to be worth the effort. This time, it was to replace the CentOS server that kept locking up in less than 24 hours under the stress of incoming syslog data from 80,000+ hosts. Admittedly, syslog-ng is partially at fault, given that it leaks about 20 file handles per minute, but you wouldn’t expect that to cause scary ext3 errors that require a reboot. The BSD ffs seems to be more mature in that regard, although its performance goes to hell fast unless you turn on soft dependencies.

[Update: Oh, and to be fair, I should mention the downside of this, which is simply that adjusting the right knob to the wrong setting (or vice-versa) will kill everyone within thirty yards of the server.]