Patent ID: 8307440

Claim:
A method for use with a system including a plurality of deep packet inspection engines and state shared by the plurality of deep packet inspection engines, wherein one of the plurality of deep packet inspection engines is a writer deep packet inspection engine, the method comprising: (A) receiving, at the writer deep packet inspection engine, a first write request from a first one of the plurality of deep packet inspection engines, wherein the plurality of deep packet inspection engines comprise microprocessors and are to perform deep packet inspection on packets in a network traffic for malicious packets; (B) queueing, at the writer deep packet inspection engine, the first write request on a write queue; (C) dequeuing, at the writer deep packet inspection engine, the first write request from the write queue when the first write request reaches an end of the write queue, wherein the dequeued first write request comprises first data; and (D) issuing, by the writer deep packet inspection engine, the dequeued first write request to an interface of the shared state, wherein the interface of the shared state is to write the first data of the dequeued first write request to a first unit of the shared state.