NFS, or what? 
I've been running SnipSnap on Saturn, which of course means all the Java and the SnipSnap itself are NFS-mounted. This appears to time out periodically, and about once a week the periodic time-out becomes fatal. The Jetty (or whatever it is) responds to connection requests but never returns any data. The SnipSnap needs to be killed and then restarted. Dunno if this is due to the non-standard way in which this is being run, or to something else more intrinsic to SnipSnap itself.