Hi folks Our cassandra (and other java-based apps) started experiencing extremely high CPU usage as of 8pm eastern time (midnight UTC).
The issue appears to be related to specific versions of java + linux + ntpd There are many solutions floating around on IRC, twitter, stackexchange, LKML. The simplest one that worked for us is simply to run this command on each affected machine: date; date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`; date; CPU drop was instantaneous - there was no need to restart the server, ntpd, or any of the affected JVMs.
