I agree... murder is effective, but
much too draconian...
Remember,
it is a good thing for the "system load" to be as high as it can possibly be! (The CPU loves to be busy.) That is,
as long as there is not excessive
waiting. If a queue is building up, then the bottleneck needs to be isolated and found.
If "load is too high," then it necessarily means that there is a bottleneck somewhere. It probably is not the CPU; it's probably some overloaded device, or the I/O channels that get you there.
The normal reason for the mantra, "add more RAM," is that this is a cheap-and-easy way to achieve more "I/O avoidance" without going to the trouble of hunting down where the root cause of the problem is. But sooner or later you have to do things like that anyway.
First question: are users actually
complaining? If not, "no problem." But if they do, what exactly are they complaining
about? A particular application? A particular file? Sluggish response-time? Okay then,
who are they? What are they doing? Do other users complain similarly? Do you find little voodoo dolls of yourself with pins stuck through them in
all the department cubicles, or just certain ones?
All of these are clues.