Freebsd IP Forwarding performance (question, and some info) [7-stable, current, em, smp]

[Andrew Snow]

I'm no expert, but I imagine the problem is because the net processing 
of FreeBSD is not pipelined enough.  We are now able to affordably throw 
many gigabytes of RAM into a machine, as well 2 to 8 CPUs.  So why not 
allow for big buffers and multiple processing steps?

I be happy to give up a bit of latency in order to increase the parallel 
processing ability of packets travelling through the system.  I could be 
wrong but I imagine it would be better to treat the processing of 
pockets as a series of stages with queues (that can grow quite large if 
necessary).