Patent ID: 7080168

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: at least one ingress port to receive packets from external sources; a plurality of egress ports to receive the packets from the at least one ingress port and forward the packets to external destinations; and a processor to maintain continuous aggregate per egress port counts for the at least one ingress port; wherein the packets have an associated flow based on at least a source and destination of the packets and the flow of the packets is controllable, wherein the packets are stored in flow controllable queues while awaiting forwarding from the at least one ingress port and the packets are stored in the flow controllable queues based on the associated flow of the packets rather than egress ports associated with the packets; and wherein the aggregate per egress port count for an egress port includes packets having a flow that is associated with the egress port and is eligible for forwarding, wherein the aggregate per egress port count for each egress port is updated to account for changes to the flow controllable queues associated therewith as the changes occur rather than summing a count for each flow controllable queue associated therewith.