[ale] Gentoo vs. RedHat

[mmillson at meritonlinesystems.com (Mike Millson)]

I'm considering giving Gentoo a try for a box that will act as a router
and run dhcp, squid, and portsentry. But I'm wondering, how fast are bug
fixes available compared to when RedHat fixes are available via up2date.
Also, it sounds like whenever Gentoo installs an update, it has to
compile in the background. Is the Gentoo update process so resource
intensive that it could bog down a production box until the update is
finished? Or is it no worse than downloading files using up2date?
Anything I should be wary of using Gentoo on a production system router?

Mike