Load balancing performance?

[Brian Vosburgh]

We run F5 Networks BigIP and I've been able to push over 100MB/sec with no packet loss through them.  Is NetFilter this fast on a PIII 500 w/ 512MB RAM?  What tweaks would be required to approach this load balancing with NetFilter?  I know F5 has some of their own thing in the code but it's still an exploitation of BSD's IPFilter capabilities, but 2.4.17 seems pretty quick as an OS... anyhow I'm just interested in what some of the gurus on this list think.