New to F5 in general, have a couple of older BIG-IP 1500 LTMs...

I recently took a position at a small company and I inherited a pair of LTM 1500s that do load balancing for our production websites. Right now our overall load is pretty slow for the most part (we're in the medical field) We typically move 4 - 5mbit traffic sustained throughout the business day, see about 15 - 16 requests per second and 16 - 17 connections per second globally. The boxes are running 9.3.1 build 37.1, single processor, and I think 512MB of RAM

Right now the boxes are running in active/standby mode and are working perfectly for our current traffic load.

We recently signed a large contract that is going to more than quadruple our expected web traffic from October - February of this year and in anticipation of this, I wrote a series of Ruby scripts that simulates 1000s of customers accessing our site simultaneously and the F5 couldn't handle the load it would seem. Page loads were taking more than 20 - 30 seconds and CPU usage spiked to 99% on the active F5. (the actual web servers behind the F5s weren't under strain, it appeared the F5s were the bottleneck)

I'm trying to properly size a solution to support this influx of customers (without breaking the bank of course) and I haven't been able to find any data on what the LTM 1500 can handle, and if upgrading the memory or possibly CPU will allow us to get through using our current hardware.

I'd also like to get the boxes relicensed as some of the features in version 10 look attractive as well.

Any help or insight would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ron Prague