help with daily-occurring iowait issues... the linux guy?

It seems every night around 9:30pm, my server is getting practically taken down by some background process that is maxing out the IOWAIT on my processors, rendering the server nearly inaccessible. I've disabled all of the CPanel daily updates, and removed their cron jobs, but it seems to still run every night, even though my update settings are all disabled.

I've heard something about 'auditd' causing this problem. What is that and should I disable it (and if so, how)?

Also, is there any way to improve the iowait situation by updating the kernel, or is there anything else i can do? after searching on here, it seems 'the linux guy' is a guru for this kind of thing.

Any help would be appreciated.

system:

CentOS 3.5
kernel - 2.4.21-32.0.1.ELsmp
cpanel/apache 1.3.33/php 4.3/mysql 4.01

 

 

 

 

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