Mysterious High Server Load with low CPU use

I have been banging my head against the wall. I'm on a VPS with 4 CPU cores, 3 GB RAM, and 512 MB swap.

Load has been crazy high 6.0 to 9.0 for the last 5 minutes, and generally high all morning. However, according to top, CPU is idle about 75% and there is very little I/O wait (about 1%). Swap is also consistently used about 99% with RAM used only about 33%.

I host several sites on this VPS and it looks like traffic is normal if not minimal on most sites.

I can't figure this out and am not sure where to look. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

A quick update, I have been watching vmstat. swap usage is almost always 0, disk i/o is rare, idle remains above 60% and disk wait is below 5%. I have no idea where these load numbers are coming from!