Re: cpu needed to NAT 45mbs

Darden, Patrick S. wrote:

From my experience, a fast P4 linux box with 2 good NICs can NAT 45Mbps easily. I am NAT/PATing >4,000 desktops with extensive access control lists and no speed issues. This isn't over a 45Mb T3--this is over 100 Mb Ethernet.

NAT processing requirement thresholds are all about *flows* per second, not *bytes* per second. Once you have a cached flow, it's trivial. The overhead of statefully tracking flows, setup, teardown, timeouts, housecleaning, etc., are the limiting factors. If you want to stress-test it, you should benchmark it with SQL Slammer :-) Jeff