Let me see

1. Open Source OS

2. Open Source web server

3. Open Source programming language

4. Open Source web framework

5. Some (relatively) simple customer support ticketing app [not likely to be a system pounding Gorilla]

And they claim that they've not been able to root-cause a Kernel panic and a framework slowdown?

And they've spent $100K on that with no results to show for it?

That sounds really strange to me.

[I've debugged Linux kernel panics on custom stacks, with no disk/logs, only console, 32MB of RAM, PPC cross-compiled - and never run into a dead-end like this]