I think this only pertains to Linux distros. Yesterday I saw my machine
almost grind to a halt. I thought it was due to some testing I was doing
with Cassandra, but nothing changed even after killing the Cassandra
nodes I was running. I did notice several ksoftirqd processes. I wound
up rebooting this morning. Looks like the issue is caused by a leap
second. Just wanted to pass this along in case anyone else notices an
unusual, expected load on your machine.
http://serverfault.com/questions/403732/anyone-else-experiencing-high-rat...