[Zope] So...Zope Really DOES Choke And No One Knows Why?

Wonderful, just wonderful. Ahh, the joys of being on the cutting edge. So if my installation of Zope chokes regularly-- like every few hours-- and apparently I'm not alone, then I guess the only way to take care of the problem (until someone nails it in the source code) is to write a cron script that tests, I reckon, port 8080, every 5 minutes or so. How do I test this? ping won't do it. Does anyone have a cron script written that they'd care to share? TIA, BenO