The NameNode was experiencing high load and instability after being restarted. Graphs showed unknown high load between checkpoints on the NameNode. DataNode logs showed repeated 60000 millisecond timeouts in communication with the NameNode. Thread dumps revealed NameNode server handlers waiting on the same lock, indicating a bottleneck. Source code analysis pointed to repeated block reports from DataNodes to the NameNode as the likely cause of the high load.