Ntp Is Set; High Load; Full Swap

I was getting high load on one of our test machines -- it was high enough to where I couldn't ssh in. However, I happened to have a shell open at the time with top running. Load was very high and swap was full. -- afterwards, when I check /var/log/messages it looks as if the load affected the time (see below).

1) At first I was guessing that the load somehow affected the clock, but you'd think it would slow it down -- but apparently the pace of time was quicker?

2) perhaps the time was wrong in the first place - then upon reboot, ntp sync'd up properly.

3) time was originally correct but after the high load, it somehow erroneously sped up the ticks

Then again, from googling around someone on another forum was saying that the computer clock chip shouldn't ever be affected.

So my question isn't about what cause the load, but why was there a time descrepancy in /var/log/messages, and was it related to the load?

from top:

top - 17:52:32 up 246 days, 23:34, 1 user, load average: 76.52, 75.68, 68.79
Tasks: 192 total, 62 running, 129 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0% us, 99.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.2% hi, 0.2% si
Mem: 3376168k total, 3281060k used, 95108k free, 256k buffers
Swap: 4192956k total, 4192956k used, 0k free, 95656k cached

from /var/log/messages:

Jun 5 17:34:44 staging kernel: Out of Memory: Killed process 26522 (oracle).
Jun 5 17:41:45 staging sshd(pam_unix)[25223]: session closed for user gin
Jun 5 17:09:50 staging syslogd 1.4.1: restart.