Patent ID: 7826469

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving incoming network packets with a network device; assigning, with the network device, the network packets to one of a plurality of FIFO priority queues maintained by the network device based on one or more priority characteristics of the network packets; writing the network packets to a write buffer associated with the priority queue; assigning a first one of a plurality of memory pages to the one of the priority queues to which the network packets were assigned, wherein each of the plurality of memory pages comprises a block of contiguous memory address space; reading the network packets from the write buffer; storing each of the network packets from the write buffer to the first memory page in a FIFO ordering by consecutively writing the network packets, in the order in which the network packets were received, to sequential 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 priority queue.