Eric:
Yup… the above fix takes care of that. What’s happening on Dreamhost
is that their process monitor comes around and kills off the dispatchers
after they’ve been around awhile. The fix simply ignores the request to
terminate 
If you’re on a shared host, you’re probably set up to use dynamic
dispatchers for fcgi. Not a good thing. If you’re hosting your own
site, use static fastcgi dispatchers. (static dispatchers are mentioned
on several blogs as well as the Agile book)
My setups here will be using static dispatchers for this very reason.