Today there was a leap second at 23:59:60 UTC. On one of my systems, this caused a high CPU load starting from around 02h00 GMT+2 (which corresponds with the time of the leap second). ksoftirqd and some java (glassfish) process where using lots of CPU time. This system was running Debian Squeeze with kernel 2.6.32-45. The problem is very easy to fix: just run
# date -s "`date`"
and everything will be fine again. I found this solution on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=134113389621450&w=2. Apparently a similar problem can happen with Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome/Chromium, Java, Mysql, Virtualbox and probably other processes.
I was a bit suprised that this problem only happened on this particular machine, because I have several other servers running similar kernel versions.