I added an iotop invocation to vcs:/etc/cron.d/sv, at the same time as top, to see if it gets us anything useful. Also nice-d all the relevant cron jobs.
There was a load average of 10+ on both Saturday and Sunday from 0700 though 0800 (more or less), so clearly the backup job change was not a panacea (as expected). /var/tmp/toplog shows the usual array of git, bzr, cvs, etc., processes, mostly niced, mostly in disk wait. The backup job doesn't even show up any more. Sigh. karl
