Where's my load average coming from?

[Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One of my servers was a bit "unresponsive". After waiting about 20 seconds  
for an ssh connection, the root shell seemed fine, but top showed this:

top - 06:31:36 up 3 days, 21:37,  2 users,  load average: 6.00, 6.00, 6.00
Tasks: 294 total,   1 running, 277 sleeping,   0 stopped,  16 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.1 us,  0.1 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.8 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0  
st
KiB Mem :  4045896 total,  1200824 free,   346588 used,  2498484 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  2096112 total,  2093448 free,     2664 used.  3288268 avail Mem

 PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+  
COMMAND
22031 root      20   0  156776   4092   3480 R   0.9  0.1   0:00.04  
top
   1 root      20   0  147032   7660   5616 D   0.0  0.2   0:14.18  
systemd
   2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.05  
kthreadd
   3 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.01  
ksoftirqd/0


The load average was 6. But nothing was burning CPU.

After poking around, all signs were pointing to systemd doing what systemd  
does best:

# systemctl status
Failed to read server status: Connection timed out

And the 16 zombie processes were system daemons, that should've been reaped  
by systemd.

"reboot" did nothing, of course. "reboot --force" did the trick.

Setting aside yet another systemd fiasco (on a mostly idle server that did  
absolutely nothing for the last ten hours) I'm curious as to how  
/proc/loadavg could end up reporting a load average of 6, without any  
processes being seeming to be doing anything.

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