July 1 2012 Linux problems? High CPU/Load? Probably caused by the Leap Second!

(Update posted, see below)

As posted in multiple places around the web:

Debian

/etc/init.d/ntp stop
date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`

Red Hat

/etc/init.d/ntpd stop
date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`

Update:

This first manifested itself for us in our Java stacks — all of our (dual processor) Tomcat servers were running at a load of 30-40.  However, this is a known (and fixed) kernel bug:

https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=6b43ae8a619d17c4935c3320d2ef9e92bdeed05d

Apparently, simply forcing a reset of the date is enough to fix the problem:

date -s "`date`"

2 thoughts on “July 1 2012 Linux problems? High CPU/Load? Probably caused by the Leap Second!

  1. This post absolutely saved my life. We have tomcat containers and they hit 100% utilization at midnight and never dipped at all. I ran the single “date” command at the bottom of the post and everything immediately corrected. We are now back at under 8% utilization.

    Nice job. I hope many others don’t hit their heads against a wall before seeing the post.

  2. Thanks for this post! Server load dropped to normal levels immediately upon running the date reset command.

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