Interestingly enough, I am not experiencing the slowdowns users like
Chris report.  I am able to pull my entire 4 megabit line down with
minimal effort on the firewall.  Granted, 5.3 uses a bit more CPU but
nothing too absurd.  The test was run using two client PCs: one running
Azureus and an HTTP download from IBM, and the other running eXeem for a
total of maybe 80 or so streams.  CPU use was in the low 20 percentiles
regardless of the HTTP download running or not.  IIRC I believe the 4.3
release tree would run around 10-15% in similar tests.  My firewall is a
266MHz Pentium (not PII) with 64MB RAM.  A simple proportion would not
agree with the numbers others are experiencing.  Perhaps it is an issue
with a particular NIC chipset or code optimization (586 vs 486)?  I am
using sis and fxp.
                Kevin