Oopsie! Did I do that?

My workstation upon logging in at the office this morning:

doug@serval doug $ uptime
 10:35:38 up 7 days,  1:52,  1 user,  load average: 461.38, 460.93, 459.78

...it would seem that every once in awhile the syslog daemon blocks on my Gentoo box. Each crontab that calls syslog (several hundred of them) blocks in turn, which causes the high load average. The system was still pretty responsive, though.