I'm having trouble with a new router/firewall. We bought a commercial firewall product. The product is based on busybox with 2.6 Linux kernel. The machine it runs on is dual 1.0 GHz processor with 1 GB of memory. It also contains two network cards. One of them is Intel Ethernet Pro 100(eth0) and the other one is 3Com 3c905c(eth1). This machine performs great until the bandwidth grows above 12MB of out bound traffic. Then it starts dropping packets and network slows to crawl. I check the cpu and memory utilization and the machine seems to be doing nothing. I check the syslog and it doesn't report any errors. The bandwidth usage for out bound traffic grows to about 35 to 40mb a day. The amount of inbound is around 10 to 15MB a day. The bandwidth estimations are based on 5 minute averages. Is Linux capable of handling this much traffic? Is the machine big enough to handle it? Do I did special nics to handle this much traffic?
Also does anyone know of products that can simulate internet traffic condition.

Thanks Eric

That is a significantly powerful machine (arguably overkill, but that is another story) and you really aren't pulling much data through it. So the problem is not with the hardware or the operating system, but likely a misconfiguration or glitch in one of the programs running on it.

Though since this is a commercial product, why not call and ask them what the problem is? They are going to know a lot more about how to troubleshoot this device then any of us will, especially since you didn't actually give the name of the device in the first place.

I have contacted them and sent them a backup of the config. I haven't heard anything back from them in few days. I just want to ask a few questions about the machine just to make sure I was point in the right direction.

Thanks Eric