Web server stopped serving pages this morning. Not sure what went wrong but I was able to login to it okay and Apache still showed running.of life, will be stable.
An update, it is not a problem with the web server but a problem with WordPress plugins. For some reason the particular collection I use which got along fine until an update to Comet Cache now hangs.
As a temporary fix I am going to remove Comet Cache from our main site. This will make it slightly slower until an update to fix becomes available.