I have a very high load on my machine and don't know what is responsible or how to find out.

On the machine runs a jboss appserver and mysql. Here is a top from the user at peak time:

top - 16:23:01 up 101 days,  6:50,  1 user,  load average: 23.42, 21.53, 24.73
Tasks:   9 total,   1 running,   8 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 17.2%us,  1.6%sy,  0.0%ni, 80.4%id,  0.1%wa,  0.1%hi,  0.7%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  16440784k total, 16263720k used,   177064k free,   151916k buffers
Swap: 16780872k total,    30428k used, 16750444k free,  8963648k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
27344 b         40   0 16.0g 6.5g  14m S  169 41.7   1184:09 java
 6047 b         40   0 11484 1232 1228 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 mysqld_safe
 6192 b         40   0  604m 182m 4696 S    0  1.1  93:30.40 mysqld
 7948 b         40   0 84036 1968 1176 S    0  0.0   0:00.07 sshd
 7949 b         40   0 14004 2900 1608 S    0  0.0   0:00.03 bash
 7975 b         40   0  8604 1044  840 S    0  0.0   0:00.44 top

The CPU usage of the java process is normal. The peaks only show up when i deployed a certain web application. Could the resulting network traffic boost the load in such way that i don't see it in top?