[squid-users] CPU saturation?

A question to the floor. We are running squid 2.5STABLE3 and have a
non-caching setup including the following configuration statements:

<snip>
cache_dir null /dev/null

acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
no_cache deny all

ident_lookup_access deny all
request_timeout 1 minute
connect_timeout 1 minute

fqdncache_size 2048
pipeline_prefetch on

half_closed_clients off
client_persistent_connections off
server_persistent_connections off
</snip>

With approximately 3000 open file descriptors (configured at compile
time and set at runtime with ulimit -HSn 16384) and an equivalent no. of
client/server TCP connections we see a constant CPU usage of ~95-100%.
Is this normal!? The hardware is as follows:

Dual Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz (Linux of course manages the CPU
affinity as we know squid isn't multi-threaded)
6G of memory

Disk stats shouldn't matter as we aren't caching.

If this is not normal do we need to upgrade to patch a known bug that I
have failed to find amongst all the squid resources on the NET?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Jim Vanns

-- 
James Vanns BSc (Hons) MCP
Canterbury Christ Church University
Senior Systems Programmer (Linux / C & C++)
Encryption Key: http://keys.se.linux.org/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x3B09EE224A653EA9
Signature Verification Key: http://keys.se.linux.org/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x47FF170724959054