[squid-users] Performance or lack thereof issues

Guys and gals,

We are experiencing some performance issues. There are approx. 3000 users
that all connect to the proxy to get to the net.
We have only 1 proxy up right now running squid 2.5STABLE1 on RH 9 (kernel
2.4). The RPM was used to install the package.

After 15 minutes of accepting connections the proxy seems to slow down when
serving web pages to users. If i restart the service the pages are served
with blinding fast speed, could this be due to too many connections bogging
down the service? Included are some files in case anyone wants to know what
is going on with the box. I do get a FD Warning in the cache log, and have
looked at uping the FD's and then recompiling squid using the 2.6 src. But
any info would be helpful.

Also can you cluster or load balance with squid?