Ok, I'll bite. We're routinely shoving 500mbps through our FreeBSD system running zebra, and we've never hit the 50% cpu mark. 3 GigE BGP peers passing me a full table and one GigE LAN interface, a few VLANs, lengthy IPFW rules, and tons of "count" rules so I can MRTG each IP passing through it. In some off network synthetic testing, I easily maxed out our GigE LAN interface before the router dropped a packet. All this on a $1800 Dell server with a $150 Intel PCI-X card slapped in there. This system's been up for 6 months now. Zero crashes, zero hung interfaces, zero problems.
I'm not saying a FreeBSD+Zebra system is going to do everything that your high end router will, but I haven't run into anything that I couldn't find some way of doing with the tools that I had.
My biggest bitch is the lack of multipath routing (yes I know you can hack it in), but the ability to load balance of equal cost links would be a really nice feature. --
-=-=-=-=-=-=-<>-=-=-=-=-=-<>-=-=-=-=-=-<>-=-=-=-=-=-<>-=-=-=-=-=-=-< Ryan Mooney ryan@pcslink.com <-=-=-=-=-=-=-><-=-=-=-=-=-><-=-=-=-=-=-><-=-=-=-=-=-><-=-=-=-=-=-=->