Noticed my new build box was running slow and found kswapd is eating lots of cpu, any ideas on how I can resolve this?

Tasks: 5007 total, 3 running, 67 sleeping, 4937 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.5%us, 50.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 45.9%id, 1.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2042856k total, 1996780k used, 46076k free, 11368k buffers
Swap: 5269304k total, 15312k used, 5253992k free, 45876k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
160 root 15 -5 0 0 0 R 96 0.0 6:23.58 kswapd0

oh just noticed has 5007 tasks in total, surely this can't be right????

That (kswapd) is a symptom, not a problem per se.
All them stopped tasks eating all the memory is (probably) the problem.

After a reboot top shows....

top - 12:39:02 up 0 min, 1 user, load average: 0.71, 0.23, 0.08
Tasks: 69 total, 1 running, 68 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.0%id, 0.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2042856k total, 108792k used, 1934064k free, 6064k buffers
Swap: 5269304k total, 0k used, 5269304k free, 53700k cached

however when I ran eject /dev/hda it shot back up to

Tasks: 4599 total, 5 running, 4594 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.5%us, 96.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.3%id, 1.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2042856k total, 1995620k used, 47236k free, 1952k buffers
Swap: 5269304k total, 632k used, 5268672k free, 27728k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
160 root 15 -5 0 0 0 R 92 0.0 2:20.70 kswapd0
7182 root 20 0 9596 6152 428 S 46 0.3 0:10.40 bash
7181 root 20 0 9592 6148 428 S 25 0.3 0:10.70 bash
7187 root 20 0 9596 5916 192 R 25 0.3 0:00.84 bash

and the command hung

when I topped again (with eject still running) a couple of minutes later it showed

top - 13:03:50 up 8 min, 2 users, load average: 2.78, 2.28, 1.13
Tasks: 4770 total, 5 running, 4765 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.5%us, 98.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2042856k total, 1994812k used, 48044k free, 400k buffers
Swap: 5269304k total, 174456k used, 5094848k free, 11520k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
160 root 15 -5 0 0 0 R 99 0.0 6:41.72 kswapd0

Eject used to work fine?

update, now when I try to mount the drive I get

mount /dev/hda -t iso9660 -r /mnt/cdrom
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg

[ 169.268283] hda: rw=0, want=68, limit=4
[ 169.268283] isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=hda, iso_blknum=16, block=16

I'd be guessing you have a script (or alias maybe) for "eject" that's getting in the way. Try this to see what all those processes are

that command returns

5 getty
2 sshd
2 pdflush
1 watchdog/1
1 watchdog/0
1 vsftpd
1 usb-storage
1 uniq
1 udevd
1 sort
1 scsi_eh_2
1 scsi_eh_1
1 scsi_eh_0
1 rsyslogd
1 rpc.statd
1 ps
1 portmap
1 named
1 migration/1
1 migration/0