[GLLUG] kswapd consuming mass quantities

[Brad Fears]

Once in awhile, our squid proxy server goes on the fritz and starts
consuming large amounts of system resources.  Usually when this happens,
a simple restart of the process will fix it, but on a few occasions,
that doesn't fix the problem.  On those occasions, I've noticed that
kswapd is consuming about 30-40% of my cpu, and doesn't seem to want to
let go of it without a reboot.

I didn't find much of a reference to kswapd on google, so I'm wondering
what it's used for, and how I can clear/restart it if this happens
again.  My assumption would be that it has something to do with handling
swap space, which would make sense that it goes on the fritz when squid
does, since squid is a memory hog.

--Brad Fears