Want to scare you children? Show them tbench regression graph.

Horror stories
Here come horror stories.

That's how we live on 4 32-bit Xeons (2 physical, 2 logical hyper-threaded CPUs) and 8gb of RAM (we can be a little bit better for 2.6.28-rc1 with 4gb though)...

It would be interesting to see how the latest 2.2 and 2.4 kernels do

Because there's almost no support for newer ethernet cards.

A loopback test doesn't depend on a specifyc ethernet driver, i suspect