Regardless of recommendations, people are using commodity server-grade SMP hardware to run commodity OS's to get the job done, and given the people who have chimed in here, apparently are doing it without lots of problems. The increase on this and other lists of questions about Mikrotik, Vyatta, and other nontraditional routing platforms is an interesting throwback to the days of Proteon routers, the original SUN, and Cisco's multibus roots, and it shows that people are deploying these newer and much faster boxen in the real world, bugs and all.
How many of them are deploying server-grade SMP hardware / commodity OS to handle 10 Gig links and expect to handle DoS attacks using minimum sized packets? That's 14.88 Mpps with Ethernet encapsulation, for each 10 Gig link. Anybody? Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no