Patent ID: 6973503

Claim:
A method for preventing at least in part overloading of a control processor comprising the steps of: configuring a table and a plurality of control blocks, wherein said table stores a listing of a plurality of slow path packets along with a plurality of associated actions to be performed on said plurality of slow path packets, wherein said slow path packets are packets that are redirected to one or more control processors to be processed from one or more network processors, wherein each of said plurality of control blocks is configured to measure a data transmission rate; receiving a slow path packet of data; and searching said table to determine one of said plurality of actions to be performed on said received slow path packet; wherein one of said plurality of actions is to transmit a value of a length of said received slow path packet to a control block corresponding to a type of said received slow path packet, wherein if said control block determines that transmitting said received slow path packet exceeds a user selectable bandwidth to an appropriate control processor then a network processor discards said received slow path packet thereby preventing at least in part overloading said appropriate control processor.