listmail wrote:
Good suggestion. Disconnecting the Ethernet cables from the NICs did not make a difference. However, shutting down the interfaces (e.g ifdown eth0, ifdown eth1) did cut the load average down to nothing (0.00).
So it wasn't actual traffic, but something that the interfaces were doing, or something that was trying to talk to one or both of them.
That's interesting. A few ideas (I'm just trying divide and conquer here -- I don't have a hypothesis): 1. See if it's one interface or the other. Does just shutting down one make a difference? 2. Use tcpdump on the interface to see what's going on there, even when the cables are disconnected. (I may be wrong about seeing anything when it's disconnected; you may not see any traffic if the driver knows nothing can go out.) 3. Do "chkconfig --list" to find out which services are on, and shut them down one by one to see if one is the offender.