Maybe somewhat of a vague question, but what would constitute a moderate and a heavy load as depicted by "top" on any particular machine? I am trying to justify running this machine with near 100% cpu utilization on both, with load averages between 5 and 5 according to top. I don't particularly see any significant slowdown in the running processes, but there is a chance the disk I/O might become an issue if too many things are going on at once. As for actual running processes, it varies between 5 and 9, depending on time of day. Memory is not really an issue, even tho usage tops out around 1.3 - 1.4Gb, and only a small usage =< 500k swap.
X does seem to get pretty sluggish at those load levels, and I've thought about dumping back to a text console for most of the runtime, but I like my Xterms and monitoring applets.
Sam