[squid-users] squid performance and hardware help

Hello,
   We have a cache server which handles a fair amount of traffic. I think
our stats are something like:

Average HTTP hits 1048.0 req/min
Average HTTP requests 2312.0 req/min
Average Percentage 45.0 %

(this is on a monthly average). This particular machine is currently
running on a dual Pentium 3 550 and around 1 GIG of ram with a 30 gig
AUFS cache dir. Over time we find that performance degrades and we've run
into problems with maxing out FD's etc. etc.

Most of the hardware determination stuff in the FAQ is quite old and
relatively low volume. Can someone point me to some resources that might
help in properly sizing our hardware to our request rates?

I've attached some current stats from cache-mgr

The source was compiled with:

./configure --enable-async-io --enable-snmp --enable-linux-netfilter --disable-ident-lookups --enable-underscores

and we have:

# cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr
1332 416 16384
#

Should we be rebooting our cache servers on a regular basis to keep them
fresh? BTW, the OS is:

# uname -a
Linux proxy 2.4.18 #2 SMP Thu May 30 10:08:14 PDT 2002 i686 unknown
#