after a while (a day or so) the slave became inactive.

i.e., a job would barely start, but not actually check against the repository (subversion), and the job would just be ongoing without doing anything for many hours, until i killed it.

the console showed only two lines - informing on which slave the job started.

when i changed back to 1.372 (i skipped an update) the slave is behaving nicely again.