ipchains performance?

[Jon Revie]

I'm looking for a little help finding ipchains statistics.  I've been
using some simple ipchains rules on personal systems for a while, running
ipmasquerading and everything, which has worked well.  However, the
company I work for is thinking about maybe giving ipchains a shot at
running the company firewall, and they have a much bigger pipe than what
I'm used to.

Does anyone know what kind of system (processor, RAM, etc) would be needed
to handle all incoming traffic for a DS-3?  Or if there's anywhere where
there have been reviews about it's performance against other firewall
systems for Linux.  I know a lowly 386 can handle a simple 10M of traffic,
I'm just not sure what is needed to handle a considerably larger pipe.

Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.
--
Jon Revie revie@home.com http://www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~revie

"Somebody told me how frightening it was how much topsoil we
are losing each year, but I told that story around the camp-
fire and nobody got scared."  - Jack Handey