the reason it stoped for 5 min and started again is because that is your httpd server. sombody's site on your server must have alot of traffic or just has alot of disk activity.
Like i said before httpd -dssl just means that apache is started with ssl support and it does not mean that ssl is whats causing it. Add those lines i pasted above you your httpd.conf file and run
/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl stop
/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl startssl
also do this tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log if you see alot of codered activity then the stuff i pasted above will help.
Some times people have Bulitin board systems running that are written in perl or a perl script or somthing running that have the -W on the top line with the perl descriptor. ex: /usr/bin/perl -W this can cause a hell of alot of traffic. A client here did this to his BBS and caused a dedicated 1ghz server running 512 ram to crash.
If you want me to look at your server send you your root password and ip address to
[email protected]
I can also add those lines if you'd like.