Sluggish behavior of IBM 6000/320

[bowman at uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu]

I have a model 320 with 16 MB of real memory configured with 64 MB of swap
space.  For the last week the system response has gotten extremely sluggish.
Logging in this morning at the console and starting X required 3 minutes, 50
seconds.  The system will make long pauses (several minutes), during which
there is very little disk activity.  This occurs in the middle of window
updates, backups (no X running), compiles, etc.  Previously, the system
did not behave this way, and to the best of my knowledge I have made
no configuration changes to cause this.

My only information about the problem I have is that ps shows a kernel process
using about 98% of the cpu time. (process 514 below)
    USER        PID       PPID   C         STIME   TTY  TIME COMMAND
    root          0          0 120      13:25:45      ?  0:05 swapper
    root          1          0   0      13:26:02      ?  0:46 /etc/init
    root        514          0 120        Dec 31      ? 181:32 kproc
    root        771          0   0      13:25:45      ?  0:07 kproc
    .
    .
At this point, the system had been up for 186 minutes.  I don't know
whether this is normal or not.  Another system on campus shows the same pid
(with the same strange start time), but much lower cpu use.  My SE is on
vacation, everyone else from IBM is out of town.  Any help on how to 
diagnose or cure the problem would be appreciated.

Ken Bowman
(Not a Unix guru, regretting becoming a Unix system manager.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Kenneth P. Bowman, Assistant Professor     bowman at uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu
Department of Atmospheric Sciences             bowman at uiucvmd.bitnet
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign     217-333-7105
105 S. Gregory Avenue                          217-244-4393 fax
Urbana, IL   61801