> P.S. Observe the ever present unexplained event rate fluctuations between 130-140 event/sec.

An important aspect of optimizing your system is to keep the network traffic under control. I use GBit Ethernet between FE and BE, and make sure the switch 
can accomodate all accumulated network traffic through its backplane. This way I do not have any TCP retransmits which kill you. Like if a single low-level 
ethernet packet is lost due to collision, the TCP stack retransmits it. Depending on the local settings, this can be after a timeout of one (!) second, which 
punches already a hole in your data rate. On the MSCB system actually I use UDP packets, where I schedule the retransmit myself. For a LAN, 10-100ms timeout 
is there enough. The one second is optimized for a WAN (like between two continents) where this is fine, but it is not what you want on a LAN system. Also 
make sure that the outgoing traffic (lazylogger) uses a different network card than the incoming traffic. I found that this also helps a lot.

- Stefan