watchdog/0 consumes 232% cpu usage

[ramesh raman]

Hi Team,

I have a server running with "Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.57-3+deb7u2 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Some of the server suddenly became slow and when I saw with the top command I was able to
see the watchdog is using huge %CPU Please see the below top command output.

 top - 10:52:50 up 1:06, 1 user, load average: 19.95, 19.87, 18.90
 Tasks: 106 total, 19 running, 87 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
 %Cpu(s): 8.9 us, 48.8 sy, 0.0 ni, 41.2 id, 0.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 1.1 si,
  0.0 st
 KiB Mem: 8116188 total, 610952 used, 7505236 free, 25112 buffers
 KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 used, 0 free, 264508 cached

   PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
     7 root rt 0 0 0 0 R *242.1* 0.0 29:07.39 *watchdog* /0
    12 root rt 0 0 0 0 R *240.1* 0.0 28:30.02 *watchdog* /1
    16 root rt 0 0 0 0 R 238.2 0.0 28:03.12 watchdog/2
    24 root rt 0 0 0 0 R 233.1 0.0 27:05.23 watchdog/4
   860 root -2 0 0 0 0 R * 90.3* 0.0 9:08.23 * power_saving/4*
  3762 snort 2 -18 482m 158m 4512 R 69.8 2.0 20:49.22 snort
   874 root -2 0 0 0 0 R *67.4* 0.0 6:46.99*power_saving/6 *
    28 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 36.5 0.0 29:47.57 watchdog/5
   728 root -2 0 0 0 0 R 34.8 0.0 8:49.47 power_saving/1
    36 root rt 0 0 0 0 R 27.5 0.0 32:54.00 watchdog/7
  4878 root 20 0 23184 1592 1124 R 1.5 0.0 0:00.31 top

We are strugling with the issue Kindly help me on this.

Thanks and Regards,
Ramesh R