Can't find what's causing high system loads

[George Pappas]

I'm running 5.4R on a dual Xeon machine.  Until today all has been fine, system is usually 80-90% idle with a load of 0.2-0.3 all the time.  Suddenly it's consistently only 40-50% idle with a load of 1.5-2.5.  top shows nothing except that the load is coming as system processes, 30-40% where it used to be only 2-3%.  However, running top with -S still shows nothing.
   
  I don't recall doing anything that would explain this.  What can I look for to explain this sudden increase in system load?  I've included a snapshot of top below
   
  George
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  last pid: 29263;  load averages:  1.88,  1.94,  1.81                                    up 0+15:03:45  21:42:04
701 processes: 22 running, 600 sleeping, 79 waiting
CPU states: 10.3% user,  0.0% nice, 40.0% system,  1.0% interrupt, 48.8% idle
Mem: 277M Active, 1332M Inact, 211M Wired, 69M Cache, 112M Buf, 113M Free
Swap: 748M Total, 748M Free
    PID USERNAME    PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
   11 root        106    0     0K    12K RUN    3 605:38 64.65% 64.65% idle: cpu3
   12 root        105    0     0K    12K RUN    2 537:46 58.84% 58.84% idle: cpu2
   13 root        105    0     0K    12K RUN    1 513:30 57.08% 57.08% idle: cpu1
   14 root        105    0     0K    12K RUN    0 518:14 55.57% 55.57% idle: cpu0
  978 root         96    0 15844K  9264K CPU2   3   1:27  0.10%  0.10% httpd
  459 bind        119    0 51860K 50312K RUN    1  19.1H  0.05%  0.05% named
   35 root        -68 -187     0K    12K RUN    0   7:16  0.05%  0.05% irq22: fxp0


		
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