Re: Strange load spikes on 2.4.19 kernel

[Andrew Morton]

Rob Mueller wrote:
> 
> Filesystem is ext3 with one big / partition (that's a mistake
> we won't repeat, but too late now). This should be mounted
> with data=journal given the kernel command line above, though
> it's a bit hard to tell from the dmesg log:
> 

It's possible tht the journal keeps on filling.  When that happens,
everything has to wait for writeback into the main filesystem.
Completion of that writeback frees up journal space and then everything
can unblock.

Suggest you try data=ordered.