[IDLE] Issues

[Dev Tugnait]

For some reason today my load average seemed to spike repeatedly at intervals going over 5.38 making my mouse laggy and machine terribly slow. Its a desktop machine.

ps -aux output
UsER      PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS  TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND

root       11 90.5  0.0     0   12  ??  RL   29Dec04 20354:56.82 [idle]

systat output
                    /0   /10  /20  /30  /40  /50  /60  /70  /80  /90  /100
root           idle XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Moving along to figure out what process is idling i killed X postfix and basically everything running except moused, cron, and inetd and the bare minimum needed to run csh. I didnt seem to find any applications idling or running out of the ordinary. 

I cant seem to kill the [IDLE] splads, what i am curious about is how would one diagnose such an issue? The problem started out today. My usualy load average is about 0.5.

Machine Specs
2.6ghz p4
1gb ram 2gb swap

thanks

+----------==/\/\==----------+       (__)      FreeBSD                                                        
|   <dev at unixdaemon.org>     |    \\\'',)      The                                                            
|    Kernel  ESCAFLOWNE      |      \/  \ ^    Power                                                          
| Web http://unixdaemon.org  |      .\._/_)    To                                                             
+----------==\/\/==----------+                 Serve 

[ We've switched the bath sponge with a tribble. ]