MySQL - High Load

[Jasio]

Hello,

Recently my MySQL server has been having rather high loads. It has been pushing the server's load to an average of 4.9 - 5.5 over an extended period of time (5+ hours).

In order to try and lower the load, I dropped in the my-huge.cnf configuration file, versus the standard my.cnf file (cp'ed and renamed my-huge to my.cnf, backed up my.cnf). After restarting the service, everything seemed fine but once again the load is back up. I have a few large databases around 90-140Mb which is one of the reasons why I moved to the my-huge.cnf.

The server's specs are Dual 2.8Ghz Xeon HT, with 2Gb of RAM (2Gb swap). The interesting part is that when I run 'top' to check usage I see mysqld as the top process user yet it is only showing as using 0.9% CPU and 18% RAM. I have gone through and checked other processes and they seem fine (low usage). Just in case I ran a rootkit check on the box, and it turned up nothing.

I am running the latest stable build of WHM/cPanel WHM 9.9.9 cPanel 9.9.9-S15, on Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3.0.

Help, and ideas would be appreciated.
-- Thanks

Added:

When running 'ps -A':

18874 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld_safe
18900 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18901 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18902 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18903 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18904 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18905 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18906 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18907 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18908 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18909 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18910 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld
18911 pts/3 00:00:00 mysqld

Quite a lot of mysqld processes appear, even after stoping/starting the service, at least 10 myqld processes return to the process tree.