I am running rh9. I often get a high cpu load of over 5.
But the cpu state also says, that there is about 80 or 90 percent idle time...
So, if the processor got time - got nothing to do, why doesn´t the processer take the waiting processes to decrease the load.
The processes may be waiting on some other resource to become available. For instance, if those 5 processes are doing a lot of disk I/O, there may be very little CPU use, but lack of disk bandwidth keeps those five processes in a runnable state.
First, figure out what processes aren't asleep. Start with:
$ ps axf | awk '{ if( $3 != "S") {print;} }'
Proccesses in a 'R'unnable or 'D'(uninterruptible sleep) state are contributing to your load.
You can see what files those processes have open by looking under /proc/<pid>/fd. This may give you some clue as to what's going on. If they have files open on an NFS server, perhaps the NFS server is slow to respond, or down (in which case, looking in that directory will hang, as will 'df').
You can also use iostat (part of the sysstat package) to monitor your disks and see what kind of utilization they're getting:
$ iostat -x 2
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