Does anybody have any rough figures for what kind of load (both bytes/s total throughput and packets/s) a more or less vanilla x86 running a free OS can handle today? The last time I looked at this -- several years ago -- I seemed to top out at somewhere close to 200 Mb/s total throughput; I figured I could safely count on 100 Mb/s. That is consistent with a 32-bit PCI bus running at 33 MHz: raw capacity is 1 Gb/s, but each bit takes two trips over the bus, so that's 500 Mb/s, but then there's substantial bus overhead (contention, burst setup overhead, etc.). I didn't look at packet count limits, as they didn't seem to be a problem for me in my actual traffic mix; but I expect that with enough small packets, packet count would become the limiting factor. That was in the days when a Pentium 133 was a mid-range PC. I would expect faster memories, bigger caches, but (most of all) a 64-bit PCI bus running at 66 MHz to make a big difference. Hypothetically, a box that could handle, say, 750 Mb/s is not suitable for "core" use, but it can certainly handle more than "a couple of T1s." Jim Shankland