Runaway server

Sometimes my server does very strange things. The load shoots up to the 200 or even 300. Then the server is totally unreachable. And then after a few minutes the load drops down back to between 1 and 2. THen then a random time later it shoots up again.

I noticed one strange thing while using top. The time for the kjournald is extremely high. At least, none of my other machines have this.
it concerns a redhat 7.3 distribution. The server is a P4 2 Ghz with 1 gig of DDR ram. This plesk used to run on a pent 4 1,8 Ghz, but all sites were transfered to this server and now these problems start.
Any ideas?
The top below is just after such a spike.

8:57pm up 1 day, 19:02, 1 user, load average: 1.21, 38.39, 45.73
143 processes: 138 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 3.1% user, 10.1% system, 0.0% nice, 86.7% idle
Mem: 1030772K av, 447760K used, 583012K free, 0K shrd, 24964K buff
Swap: 2040244K av, 3744K used, 2036500K free 151396K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
17411 root 16 0 48368 47M 47988 S 2.3 4.6 0:02 httpd
248 root 16 0 0 0 0 SW 2.1 0.0 118:25 kjournald
17535 root 15 0 1084 1084 836 R 1.3 0.1 0:03 top

 

 

 

 

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