EXTREME Load Phenomena - Anyone else notice this?

[jols]

On various cPanel servers I have witnessed this in the past few days:

I am running Top, and load is drifting along at 1.20, or even as low as something like 0.56. Then within ten seconds the load rockets to over 150, a few second more and it is over 400!!! No exaggeration, it the load accelerates really that fast!

One server barely hung on still running top to give me this before it finally died:

01:19:07 up 4 days, 11:02, 1 user, load average: 937.84, 604.82, 342.23


Okay, so I reboot, check the logs, check the email queue for masses of spam being sent, check the tmp directory for anything suspicious, check the secure, messages, etc. logs looking for some hint as to what may have occured, and nada, zip, nothing. The server just returns to normal after a reboot as if nothing has happened.

And of course I am unable to run netstat or anything else at the time when the load is occuring.

What the heck could be going on here? Anyone have any ideas? Anyway to prevent this?

By the way, we are running WHM 10.8.0 cPanel 10.9.0-R118

[isputra]

i have the same problem with jols and i'm running :

WHM 10.8.0 cPanel 10.9.0-S119
CentOS 3.8

[ramprage]

What kernel are you running? Did you manage to notice anything strange before the load got so high where you weren't able to run commands?

[caezar]

I solved my high CPU load with adding extra RAM memory on my server...

[isputra]

What kernel are you running? Did you manage to notice anything strange before the load got so high where you weren't able to run commands?

This is my kernel version :

Linux 2.4.21-40.EL #1 using centos 3.8