High load - very strange?

Hi everyone

My server's load just shot up and this is the top of the top output:

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10:32am up 60 days, 1:02, 1 user, load average: 18.75, 10.15, 4.36
134 processes: 133 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 0.6% user, 0.7% system, 0.0% nice, 0.1% idle
Mem: 247504K av, 216500K used, 31004K free, 0K shrd, 5232K buff
Swap: 1052216K av, 234504K used, 817712K free 34448K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
25346 apache 10 0 34224 9332 5060 D 0.9 3.7 0:19 httpd
30461 mysql 10 0 14444 5600 1208 D 0.9 2.2 0:00 mysqld
30465 root 13 0 988 988 724 R 0.9 0.3 0:00 top
1 root 8 0 108 60 48 S 0.0 0.0 0:12 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:05 keventd
3 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kapmd
4 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:02 ksoftirqd_CPU0
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 1:52 kswapd
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 47:34 kscand
7 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush
8 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:03 kupdated
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There was nothing using up much of the CPU, but the machine was v.slow.

The strange thing is the 'CPU states' percentages. Whilst the machine was lagging, these didn't add up to anywhere near 100%. As soon as it stopped lagging, the idle percentage went back up to normal.

Are there any types of processes which don't fall into the 4 CPU categories?

Cheers

Matt

 

 

 

 

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