Odd machine behavior - kernel processes dying, no entropy

[Steve Lamb]

Ok, my machine has been slowly failing for the past week or two. It gets to the point where it is barely responsive and will not even complete a shutdown. I've had to email in to the colo facility several times to get them to smack the reset button because of this.

The symptoms are always the same. Some kernel processes die. kswapd always does. bdflush sometimes does. kupdated always does. Here's the current state of affairs:

    4 root       9   0     0    0    0 D  0.0  0.0   0:11.58 kswapd
    5 root       9   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 bdflush
    6 root       9   0     0    0    0 Z  0.0  0.0   0:00.05 kupdated <defunct>

Also entropy takes a massive hit. See <http://www.dmiyu.org/lrrd/dmiyu.org/potmos.dmiyu.org.html> to see what I mean.

Does anyone know what this might be symptomatic of? Supposedly the hosting company has replaced all the hardware except for the hard drive. The symptoms persis before and after that replacement. Also, logs don't seem to indicate anything. No errors in syslog at all. :/

--
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
       PGP Key: 8B6E99C5       | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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