Optimizing Server For Proxy Hosting

i have a Pentium D 820, 2GB Ram at LT where i am hosting a few proxies. Using Centos and Directadmin.

It's realy fast and i am happy with it. The only problem i am facing is that load is jumping up to 60 sometimes but just for a few seconds. Especially when a lot of people are using the proxy and it slows down a bit. That affects only the proxified pages and not a few personal html sites i also host there.

At the moment i am seeing in top that the CPU usage varies from 0,2 to 8, 12, 21 etc but just for a second or two

here is the top output

Quote:

[root@server ~]# top
top - 12:46:18 up 23 days, 2:36, 1 user, load average: 0.36, 0.44, 0.29
Tasks: 353 total, 1 running, 351 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.2% us, 0.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 98.3% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 2066668k total, 1297168k used, 769500k free, 53192k buffers
Swap: 2040244k total, 0k used, 2040244k free, 273108k cached

and another output

Quote:

[root@server ~]# top
top - 12:58:34 up 23 days, 2:48, 1 user, load average: 0.58, 0.39, 0.30
Tasks: 209 total, 4 running, 205 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 16.9% us, 5.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 77.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 2066668k total, 1100760k used, 965908k free, 53196k buffers
Swap: 2040244k total, 0k used, 2040244k free, 276744k cached

and the number of connections on port 80

Quote:

[root@server ~]# netstat -an |grep :80 |wc -l
216
[root@server ~]#

is there any way to tweak or optimize the server so than it can cope better when a lot of people are using the proxy.