System time jumps, applications crashing

[acidrain0]

Hi, I run a mostly untouched CentOS server, nothing is installed except a server app to store data. The server has been crashing lately - after a year of no problems, so I looked into the logs of it and noticed weird discrepancies in the time around the time it crashs. So I started "watch date >> datefile" and this is what happens:

Sun Oct 17 09:52:45 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:52:47 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:52:49 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:52:51 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:52:53 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:52:55 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:52:57 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:55:20 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:30 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:32 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:34 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:36 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:38 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:40 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:42 CEST 2010
Sun Oct 17 09:57:44 CEST 2010

I've never seen anything like this and have no idea what could cause it.. Anyone have an idea?

[sileryti]

try setting the kernel parameter: "acpi=off" and see if this makes any difference.

[acidrain0]

try setting the kernel parameter: "acpi=off" and see if this makes any difference.

That didn't seem to fix it

[Rubberman]

I always set up my system with NTP to keep the time syncronized properly. It is possible that there is a glitch in the real-time clock on the system, or that some applications have disabled interrupts long enough to interfere with the clock interrupt enough to skew the time base. In any case, I have never seen this problem except when there is some hardware issue going on, and the fact that it didn't happen for a year would reinforce that theory.