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.