Trying to use nginx w/ drupal on dreamhost VPS - PHP/FastCGI crashes

I've been fairly happy w/ dreamhost and I like having their support team behind me. But - every time I try out nginx fastcgi/PHP crashes after several hours and the site goes down. I wonder if anybody here has seen this or has some ideas.

That is - yesterday I tried switching to nginx .. for a few hours it worked fine, and was faster than under apache. All was fine when I went to bed. This morning the site was down, and giving an "Bad Gateway" error page from nginx. Upon logging in to the server the fastcgi processes were not running and there was only the nginx master and worker processes.

Obviously if fastcgi was down, then nginx would be unable to contact PHP and unable to process the request and nginx would have no choice but to put up a "Bad Gateway" page.

One thing I'm curious about is why isn't fastcgi restarting if it crashes?

The nginx config being used was created by Dreamhost - so the other issue is, why does Dreamhost give me an nginx config that is so fragile?

The PHP portion is:-

            # PHP
            location ~* \.(php|php5|php4)($|/) {
                    fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT 80;
                    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.(?:php|php5|php4))(/.*)$;
                    if (!-e $document_root$fastcgi_script_name) {
                            return 404;
                    }
                    include /dh/nginx/etc/fastcgi_params;
                    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                    fastcgi_pass unix:/home/robogeek5/.php.sock;
                    #pragma php_launch robogeek5
            }