Patent ID: 8588241

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving incoming network packets with a network device; assigning, with the network device, the network packets to a selected one of a plurality of priority queues maintained by the network device based on one or more priority characteristics of the network packets; assigning a first one of a plurality of memory pages to the selected one of the priority queues, wherein each of the plurality of memory pages comprises a block of contiguous memory address space; based at least on the assignment of the network packets to the selected one of the priority queues and the assignment of the first memory page to the selected one of the priority queues, storing each of the network packets to the first memory page by writing the network packets to memory locations in the first memory page; creating a metadata for each of the network packets, wherein the metadata comprises a reference to the memory location in the first memory page of the corresponding network packet; and enqueuing the metadata for each of the network packets on the selected one of the priority queues.