Spewing Interrupted System Call

Almost everything I am having this error

Interrupted System Call

Symptoms included:

gearman_top lockups, i.e. showing a frozen state, occasionally spewing
  "Interrupted System Call" in place of the connected server
- nagios scheduling breakage, i.e. service states would not get updated
  anymore, stale checks were not rescheduled
- lots of "waiting" jobs in the check_results queue