Hi all!

I've just discovered Vyatta and, frankly, I am really impressed with its performance characteristics listed in the datasheet. In fact, the numbers are so impressive I find some of them hard to believe. And by "some of them" I mean VPN performance.

Would you please be so kind as to tell me:
1) How was the VPN performance measured (what packet sizes, ciphers and hashes were used)?

2) What is it that makes Vyatta so fast - are there any hardware encryption accelerators involved, like Via PadLock or something? I mean, Cisco ASA 5520 is x86-based, too, and even has hardware acceleration, but still is two and a half times slower than Vyatta 2502...

3) Is there any way to predict potential VPN performance of Vyatta-ready platforms by looking at their specs? Again, will building my server on a motherboard with hardware VPN accelerator improve VPN performance?