When is it time to upgrade hardware?

[louis-m]

basic question - but when is it time to upgrade my hardware?
when the processor is constantly running at 50%?
when the memory is constantly at 70%?

my alix is sitting at 1-4% idle with 60% mem usage and 13% disk usage. chugs along quite merrily running snort for the ports I have open and the servers I have.

does a faster processor give any gain under a light load?
cheers
louis

[Supermule]

Nope…. You should consider more memory. But nothing alarming.....

[Cry Havok]

Without knowing what the actual specs are, it's hard to say anything definitive.

However, with 60% memory usage you've got 40% unused so plenty of headroom.  I'd say that it's time to updgrade when:

a) Memory passes 90% (excluding the disk cache) or you're hitting swap
b) CPU usage regularly hits 100% and stays there

Disk usage is often down to logs or proxy caches so you can easily clean out the logs or the cache.