i have posted this over on stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27411659/expressionengine-stopped-parsing-some-tags-after-adding-some-content) but it is not getting much traffic so trying other channels.
summary from stackoverflow, if i add a large enough quantity of content (can be html comment) to a template my grid field loops quit parsing. essentially it feels like something is running out of memory but instead of crashing just returns the content that it has generated thus far. this happens only on production, my dev copy (same code and db) is fine.
any suggestions on places to look for limits that may be getting hit? i am very new to expressionengine so may be overlooking something super simple and obvious to everyone else. this is on ee 2.7.2.