Soft Lockups while running the daily cron job : what do with them

Hello
On a relatively busy xen server, running 10 VM, I noticed soft lock
coming regularly, around 06:25.


kern.log.2.gz:May  2 06:27:15 vaduz kernel: [10156409.027744] INFO: task
dpkg-query:24275 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
kern.log.2.gz:May  4 06:27:13 vaduz kernel: [10329259.982553] INFO: task
locate:6752 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
syslog.6.gz:May 12 06:27:17 vaduz kernel: [11020672.410138] INFO: task
update-dlocated:9078 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
syslog.7.gz:May 11 06:27:22 vaduz kernel: [10934249.078237] INFO: task
dlocate:15949 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
syslog.7.gz:May 11 06:27:28 vaduz kernel: [10934255.518954] INFO: task
kjournald:1297 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
syslog.7.gz:May 11 06:27:45 vaduz kernel: [10934272.704136] INFO: task
pdflush:244 blocked for more than 120 seconds.

I guess every debian sysadmin around here will recognize the time at
which the daily crontab jobs :)

Am I right to think here that my server is simply starving for I/O ? I
am thinking of split cron jobs out between 5:00 and 7:00, would that be
the right thing to do ?

BTW if I understand right this kernel log is an INFO message, so it
means the kernel will not kill the process ? Or will he ?

MAnu