F5 BIG-IP version 9 sends a RST packet to the client after timeout

The load balancer in production on our site currently leaves the client hanging. After timeout on the server or client, it terminates the connection to the server but doesn't terminates the connection to the client. As a result, the FireFox or IE browser spins its hourglass or whirls forever, as confused the hell out of the unsuspecting non-techie end users.
With that in mind, it is quite a relief to me to see a RST packet received by the client, after 320s of idle time ( thread.sleep(320000)) in a jsp served by Apache/tomcat. Since FireFox actually sent 'keep-alive 300' in the http request header, so I am not so sure the 300s is per FireFox's request, or per F5 Big-IP v9's own hard-coded client (or server) idle timeout. If I recall correctly, Citrix Netscaler EE9000 (version 6.1 and 7.0 beta) defaults to timeout on idle client at 180 seconds and on idle server at 300 seconds.

F5 version 9 is based on Redhat Linux 9 microkernel

I received a F5 LTM 3400 on Tuesday. Today I finally squeezed in some time to boot it up and checked it out. It seems to be based on Redhat Linux 9 microkernel.
It has two processors, so the SMP kernel is used. However, I was told by the F5 SE that only one is used for the application switching task (load balancing + content switching).