The Moore law is still with us.

True, single core systems are being phased out, but performance of a single computing system will double in eighteen months from today.

Note that its a computer system, not a chip.

And stay assured that the exact meaning of double and eighteen months will change.

This implies that any given software system that is designed to last for eighteen months in a row can be run on hardware that is twice as fast.

At S., the company I worked for from its beginning we had to accommodate the immense load of modern network environment while using off-the-shelf PC computers, running Fedora Core Linux. A year and a half after, we had upgraded to latest 64 bit multi-core machines.

In this blog I will reflect on some architectural insights we had learned from the experience of building the super-fast networking appliances.