General Questions

i am planning on making M0N0wall my main router in my internet cafe,

with 5 nics in the machine,

1 for wan
4 for the network,

can m0n0wall handle the inbound and outbound data rates that will be associated with 20 internet terminals, 10 gaming computers and 6 game decks playing online gaming all at once?

the internet isp i have will give me a 5 x 5 data pipe, can m0n0wall handle this kind of traffic?

Have you reviewed the PC Quickstart Guide?

http://doc.m0n0.ch/quickstartpc/

yes i have and the manual doesnt state anything about the limitations if any about the performance or capabilities of m0nowall.

what i am looking for is it can handle all the traffic that this setup will generate

It's not really a question of whether m0n0wall can handle it.  It is more a question of what the hardware you have m0n0wall running on can handle.  The more traffic you push through, the more CPU you'll need.

I have m0n0wall running on an old dell with a 2Ghz Pentium 4.  With 3-5 computers (often torrenting) and 3 xbox's, the CPU utilization on m0n0wall has still not gotten above a few percent.  The only thing holding us back is our ISP's speed limits (15Mb down, 786Kb up).

I will have m0n0wall on a Intel Dual core 2.8 Ghz 2 gig ram 5 Intel pci nics 30 gig hard drive, think it an handle it?

Your hardware is massively overkill, especially on the RAM.  M0n0wall will never use more than about 64MB RAM (may need more during firmware updates though).

You shouldn't have any performance trouble using m0n0wall in your situation.

Way overkill.  I run on a K6-2 500MHz on a 12Mbps/2Mbps DSL with 5 PCs doing all kinds of traffic.  The only time my CPU goes over 30% is when running more than 5Mbps of 3DES IPSEC traffic on the m0n0wall.  The only reason I would need to ever upgrade to more CPU would be to improve my VPN speeds.