Ok, this is getting annoying. There is some MYSQL process (I believe) getting hung that causes the load to spike to 60. I rebooted yesterday, yet the problem reoccured today.
I am not in swap space. The size of 450MB per mysql process seems terribly high considering just a few months ago it was 210MB (see "top" result at the start of the thread).
I'm stumped on what to try next. Does anyone know a good way to diagnose what queries are being executed at any given moment?