Sorry, in today's world of high-end routers 250kpps doesn't qualify as "plenty fast". Can your box do linerate Gigabit Ethernet with minimum size packets, on several ports simultaneously?
I didn't say that a 250kpps box was a high-end box. One reliable Mpps is not high-end either, but it can carry quite a lot of Mbps. What is C or M price for a reliable full feed Mpps ?
"My" high-end boxes never manage to impress me with their pps capability before I'm disapointed in their reliability.
I usually find that it works better to use routers to forward packets between interfaces, and Unix servers (in my case mostly FreeBSD, but that's beside the point) to run applications. Occasionally I configure a Unix box to actually forward packets. I found Lincoln Dale's characterization the other day of the "roles" of various routers, http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg11681.html to be useful. From his list I could imagine using Unix boxes for 3, 4 and 5 - but probably not 1 or 2. Also note that high-end broadband aggregation may have high enough pps that a box with software based forwarding doesn't cut it. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no