Advice on an odd networking problem

[Pete French]

Just to finish this thread for anyone googling - we found the cause
of this, which was running out of states in pf on the firewalls. The
extra call on the local webserve was generating an extra call
for memcached, whcih was being load balanced back through the
same set of firewalls.

thanks for the advice, and appologies for the http/https typo ;)

-pete.