It uses a Cavium Octeon processor which does have dedicated HW packet proce= ssing. A moderate number of prefixes won't slow it down doing vanilla for= warding, not sure about 2 million though... I believe they have recently o= ptimized some of the FW stuff to take advantage of the HW as well. =20
Layering services like FW, NAT, and tunneling definitely drops the packet r= ate significantly, but it is still capable of 100+Mbps at IMIX packet sizes= .=20
I think there are a couple of in depth tests out there.
In my experience the ERL works really well for a $99 device.=20
I sent them an inquiry and they sent a friendly but fact-free response so it is probably safe to assume that it is relatively good at basic packet forwarding but the services will kill it. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.