It’s sort of an axiom of programming that features that aren’t continually used or tested won’t actually work. A similar rule holds for system administration–any feature that hasn’t been tested since the last upgrade is probably broken. An obvious corollary suggests that systems get more reliable as their user load increases–more users means more features are used more frequently, and broken features will be spotted sooner. And the corollary to that is that any server wedged under a desk in someone’s home office is probably flakier then hell because it’s probably just sitting there collecting dust and not getting used.

I’m not convinced that that applies to my home gateway box. It’s a busy little beaver:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
 pkts bytes  prot opt in out source           destination     
 234M   75G  all  --  dsl0   *   0.0.0.0/0        0.0.0.0/0       
  47M 1001G  all  --  eth0   *   0.0.0.0/0        0.0.0.0/0       

In the 25.75 days since I last rebooted this system, it’s received over 75 GB via its DSL link and around 1 TB over its main Ethernet link. If my math is right, that’s an average of 3.6 Mbps on the Ethernet link and around 270 kbps over DSL. I wasn’t keeping outgoing traffic stats when I first booted this box, but more recent estimates make it look like there’s almost as much outgoing traffic on dsl0 as there is incoming.

CPU load is similarly heavy–the box has averaged 51.9% idle since it was rebooted. My rule of thumb for years was that any production box that was under 80% idle was due to be upgraded soon, because it was probably pegging the CPU during peak times during the day. If the box was under 70% idle, then it was time to start scrounging for an immediate upgrade. By those metrics, this box is way overdue for a major upgrade. Fortunately for my wallet, those metrics don’t really apply to this box–it’s spending a lot of its CPU time on tasks that aren’t particularly critical. Also, Linux 2.6 made some changes to /proc/stat that procinfo doesn’t seem to have picked up on; once you factor those into the equation, the box is really closer to 75% idle. Subtract off the non-critical usage, and the system is probably only 10% busy. I’ll probably upgrade it later this year if my virtual-server project works out, but that’s more for security and reliability then pure performance.