Category and Attribute relationships and possible circular logic

Question

I have a Magento storefront that is selling different colored rubber balls. I have the following categories:

Product
   Ball
      Red
      Green
      Blue

I have the following attributes:

Ball Color
   Red
   Green
   Blue

I also have products:

Ball1
Ball2
Ball3

I've given Ball1 the "Red" attribute, Ball2 the "Green" attribute and Ball3 the "Blue" attribute.

Before I started adding categories to the rubber balls the categories pages were loading fine. Once I've started adding categories however pages with multiple categories has been whitescreening with the following apache error message:

[Tue Aug 11 10:19:43 2015] [notice] child pid 50799 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

My question is, are categories and attributes somehow complexly intertwined? Is there a circular link between categories and attributes that is causing this crash? My belief is attributes are used as filters on the left navigation pane while the menu is used to see the categories for the product.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Looks as though one of our products was attempting to be loaded over and over again due to a weird plugin issue thereby sucking up all of the machine's memory and fatalling php. Deleting and recreating the product resolved this issue.