Patent ID: 8018845

Claim:
A method of rate-limiting and sampling rate-limited packets, the method comprising: identifying a current rate of packet traffic for a classification of traffic, the current rate corresponding to one of a plurality of rate-limiting states, the plurality of rate-limiting states including an in-profile forwarding state corresponding to the current rate of packet traffic being below a first threshold, an out-of-profile leak state corresponding to the current rate of traffic being above the first threshold and below a second threshold, and an out-of-profile rate-limiting state corresponding to the current rate of traffic being above the second threshold; and rate-limiting packets of said packet traffic according to said rate-limiting state corresponding to the current rate of packet traffic, wherein packets are forwarded normally during the in-profile forwarding state, one or more of the packets are selected during the out-of-profile leak state such that said selected packets are forwarded to a processing mechanism for processing said selected packets in order to analyze said selected packets to determine whether or not to modify said rate-liming packets of said packet traffic while a plurality of non-selected packets during the out-of-profile leak state are rate-limited of a first type, and packets during the out-of-profile rate-limiting state are rate-limited of a second type.