> My box has been up for about seven hours. The extent of my usage is > browsing source code via nvi on the console and via a telnet session. > After coming back from dinner an hour ago, my box went from slow to a > crawl for no apparent reason. I ran `w' to get the load avenge; they > were over 40! However, within five minutes of running w, the load average > dropped to under .2. It is now (2 minutes post that) down to 0.00 again.
I have not seen anything quite this before. Whenever you see a load spike like this, please do ps to see what the particular processes involved are. If you use ps -Au it will sort by cpu usage (I think there is a sorting option too).
