sles 9 - sudden high load avg

Linux and Unix-Like SuSE
1

Hi
Running SLES 9(4) on PE 1950. I saw yesterday that the load average on the machine was 54 and keeping around that number.

Later I found there were 54 /USR/SBIN/CRON processes running in the system. I tried to kill using killall, kill -9 pid but they did not get killed. I also tried stopping cron daemon using init script but that too failed..

Finally I had to reboot the system. I have no idea what caused it and so I am here to know..if this is a known issue...

I have disabled cron, rcd, audit, acct daemons in the system. Why Acct and Audit , because these were the daemons which I had enabled 2 days back.

rcd was already running but saw error messages like below in /var/log/messages so thought of disabling that one too..

I am wondering what is going..

2

just tried to start cron daemon on sles 9 for the system I mentioned above,

got following in mesages file:

logwatch sent me an email (after enabling cron on this machine mentioned above)