Yeah, but you'll have trouble getting decent T3 cards for it. Its true that 100Mbps ethernet should be fine.
SDL makes decent (tho not perfect) T3 cards for PCs.
So does <URL:http://www.lanmedia.com/products.htm>.
BTW, NetBSD with the recent flow cache mods can handle at least 150,000 packets per second. We haven't seen what the actual upper limit is, but that number doesn't seem to be eating a lot of CPU.
Interesting. Have you done any scalability testing? Per-flow state has been shown to scale poorly in Internet backbones.
That was with one flow. The idea of "there basically aren't flows" is not obvious on first approach to these problems, wouldn't you say, Tony :-)? -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA <paul@vix.com> "Many NANOG members have been around pacbell!vixie!paul longer than most." --Jim Fleming