snort 2.0 performance evaluation

["Terence R.T. Liu" <tie19858 () ms45 hinet net>]

We downloaded the latest snort 2.0 and put it into a P4 IPC w/ PCI-X bus and 2 broadcom gigabit  NICs. Then we tested 
it w/ IXIA http generator to evaluate the performance and throughput. However, the average throughput is pretty lower 
from 18Mbps (packet size is 128 bytes) to 80 Mbps (packet size is 1460 bytes). The number of enabled rule is about 
1,300.

Since the current version has employ the Wu's algorithm to handle the multiple-pattern matching, we assumed the 
performance should be boosted.

Does anyone figure this out? Does the testing result sound reasonable?

Thanks,
Terry.