A few days ago, I noticed that for whatever reason my net4501 box was seemingly incapable of routing packets from comcast to the local lan at faster than 800KB/sec. If I removed some PF rules (such as scrubbing) I could get 900KB/sec, but even still 100% of the cpu was consumed by interrupts (as reported by top(1)).

So, I went to Fry's and picked up a WRT54GL. Got it home, installed dd-wrt on it, and am now happy. PowerBoost (Comcast's "here's lots of bandwidth for the first few seconds of your packet stream") works, and I can download at full 8mbit (1MB/sec) as I am supposed to. Sweet.

This frees up my Soekris net4501 box for new projects. Bonus :)