Help analysing a process before it crashes and consumes all resources on a box

One of the servers I'm working on regularly crashes/freezes and consumes ALL resources on the box. It will continue doing this until the process is k开发者_开发知识库illed (difficult to run manually since the box has no resources to allow me even to enter a command) or the box is manually rebooted.

I'm not very experienced in unix OSes - can you offer advice which will help me diagnose what might be going wrong? I'm thinking things like process monitoring, and things to look out for. anything really.

thanks in advance for any advice. NQ

As you mention zones, I would suggest running prstat -cZ > /var/tmp/prstat.log & and see what zone(s)/process(s) are busy when the problem occur.