FreeBSD 5.4 pagedaemon abnormal loading

[Weicheng Pan]

Hi all:
  I have encountered a strange situation which my host went out of countrol 
out of peak time.

top -S shows that CPU Sys. is over 90 %, and pagedaemon has very high 
loading, then the server died.

Would anyone give me some advices to solve this queer problem?

Thanks and have a nice day,

Weicheng Pan.

===
top -S:
last pid: 38024;  load averages: 11.03, 39.34, 25.33
          up 1+10:55:52  03:49:51
299 processes: 8 running, 250 sleeping, 41 waiting
CPU states:     % user,     % nice,     % system,     % interrupt,     % 
idle
Mem: 475M Active, 1258M Inact, 220M Wired, 50M Cache, 112M Buf, 3976K Free
Swap: 1024M Total, 1024M Free

  PID USERNAME   PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU    CPU 
COMMAND
   55 root       -16    0     0K     8K RUN    0   6:05 104.64% 104.64% 
pagedaem
on
   44 root       -28 -147     0K     8K WAIT   1   4:18 14.94% 14.94% swi5: 
cloc
k sio
38019 root       121    0  5852K  3356K RUN    1   0:06 11.34% 10.50% httpd
38023 wcpan      122    0  2676K  1820K CPU1   1   0:03 17.75%  9.38% top
  516 root       115    0  3480K     8K select 0   0:11 162.00%  7.91% 
sendmail
15131 www          4   10   149M     8K accept 0   2:58 24.75%  4.49% httpd
    3 root        -8    0     0K     8K -      1   0:35  4.35%  4.35% g_up
37946 wcpan      109    0  6212K     8K select 0   0:07  5.51%  2.49% sshd

systat -vm
    1 users    Load 35.17 54.01 27.95                  Aug 14 03:48

Mem:KB    REAL            VIRTUAL                     VN PAGER  SWAP PAGER
        Tot   Share      Tot    Share    Free         in  out     in  out
Act 1766616    7460  2712348    14144   57140 count
All 2047068   11416  7289432    19748         pages
                                                                 Interrupts
Proc:r  p  d  s  w    Csw  Trp  Sys  Int  Sof  Flt     87 cow     236 total
     3     2226       103  208  285  287   28  200 227316 wire        6: 
fdc0
                                                   484556 act     128 8: rtc
98.1%Sys   1.9%Intr  0.0%User  0.0%Nice  0.0%Idl  1286108 inact       13: 
npx
|    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |      50972 cache       14: 
ata
================================================     6176 free        19: 
ata
                                                          daefr     4 24: 
bge
Namei         Name-cache    Dir-cache                  81 prcfr     4 25: 
bge
    Calls     hits    %     hits    %                  16 react   100 0: clk
      102      102  100                                10 pdwake
                                       26 zfod    4323760 pdpgs
Disks   ad8  ad10                       8 ofod            intrn
KB/t   0.00  0.00                      32 %slo-z   114464 buf
tps       0     0                     143 tfree        35 dirtybuf
MB/s   0.00  0.00                                  100000 desiredvnodes
% busy    0     0                                   90089 numvnodes
                                                    48765 freevnodes