Here's what happen when I run top:

8:23am up 10 min, 2 users, load average: 8.28, 8.04, 4.15
181 processes: 164 sleeping, 17 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 38.1% user, 46.6% system, 0.0% nice, 15.2% idle
Mem: 256336K av, 217136K used, 39200K free, 0K shrd, 15568K buff
Swap: 265032K av, 38276K used, 226756K free 60008K cached

I've AMD 1700+ with 256MB RAM. The load average goes up as high as 12 sometimes.

The funny thing is that, when I stop most services and start them again, the load average will be around 5, 6, 5. What's actually happening to my system?

Can it be harddisk crash is imminent? (the harddisk that I used once totally crashed to the point of unrecoverable). I found it quite strange that the harddisk can still be formatted and used again, though.

One more thing to ask, how do I recover a hard disk crash when I'm using ext3fs? It is said to be journalling, but I don't know how to recover

This may sound like a silly question, but what are the "top" CPU-utilizing processes? I would think you'd want to start looking there.

You also are using most of the physical RAM. In top, if you sort by memory usage ("M"), which processes seem to be hogging your RAM?

Are you running web or email services? Databases? Does a flurry of activity show in your system logs? How about a "netstat -n --inet"? Are there many network connections to/from the box?

None of my suggestions are "the answer", but they might get you started...

when I sort "top" according to memory usage, kdeinit and kjournald are hogging the memory (especially kdeinit, with I think more than 20 processes).

I don't know why there're so many kdeinit processes, when I didn't open any application anymore.

I'm quite new to this...When the physical memory is almost used up, does it mean that I'm in need of more memory/faster CPU? I thought that the swap can be used? Let me get it right, when a box is starting to use swap, it is time to add RAM?

thanks