Originally Posted by
hixie
firmware is actually the limiting factor, processing power and ram plays a huge role in theory but most of it is locked away by the firmware. Modified firmware helps quite a bit.
In my experience with Smoothwall & IPCOP, an old Dell P3 that i got paid to take away was waaaayyyy more than i needed (Dimes and MJ-12)
It was a P3 with 128MB RAM and i think a 20GB Quantum Fireball HDD
Back in the days i was running dimes, i had something like 30 clients smoothie didn't even break a sweat, on a normal router 15 clients would crash the router and 25 would crash the modem, had to install Smoothie and get my ISP to upgrade my modem.
EDIT: Just checked my old stats, i had 53 clients!