Thoughts? Yes, the last time I saw a ratio like that the primary SCSI path to a disk drive had died and it was talking a long time to complete disk I/O via the alternate path. The queue was small because the actual time to write, once it found a good hardware path, was very small. Take a look at sar -d and look for unusually long av times.
I am not saying that you have a physical problem, but that ratio of thousands of voluntary to forced switches is not usual or normal. And if you think about it, if the system is waiting on a partially failed disk, the disk I/O rate would be unusually low.
To further explain, a voluntary context switch occurs when the process does an I/O and takes itself out of the runqueue. When the I/O completes it puts itself back into the runque to take it's turn at the processor.
A forced or involuntary context switch occurs when the process has used more than half of it's time slice, and gets switched out before it has completed, for a process with higher or equal priority. It is then placed by the system back in the runqueue.
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