...I'm having a strange problem, after 1 week(6 or 7 days) my RH9 server experience
a sudenly very high load.
The load raises to 14, then 20 and even 30.
Always, the CPU usage in top was under 10%
Do you have an NFS mount on this system? It's possible that the server is not responding, or is slow, and processes are simply waiting on IO to that server. Make sure that "df" completes. If it hangs, then you have a mount that's not responding.
It's also possible that you have a disk that's overloaded. Watch "iostat -x 2" for a while.
There's also a possibility that you have an extremely large directory on the system (tens or hundreds of thousands of files) that processes are trying to read. If the problem starts with "sendmail", for instance, look at the files/directories that it has open using
"ls -l /proc/<sendmail-pid>/fd"
