[CentOS] cpuspeed causing high load average?

On a new server's CentOS5 install, with nothing in the way of applications running yet, I noticed that the load average was sitting between 2 and 5 all the time, even though top told me CPU was 100% idle.

Eventually I found that stopping the "cpuspeed" subsystem allowed the load average to drop down to near zero, as I would expect it to be.

I have the default /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed with no customizations.

Is the above behaviour expected? It seems wrong to me. Is cpuspeed broken?

I did notice that with cpuspeed running, the CPUs were running at their minimum frequency of 1.6GHz, and after stopping the cpuspeed service they went up to their maximum speed of 2.8GHz.

The system has a pair of E5660 Xeons, which Linux reports as 24 CPUs!

Cheers Tony