Abstract: Systems and methods are disclosed to provide egress port overload protection for network packet forwarding systems. Input packets are received at one or more ingress ports and load balanced among a plurality of egress ports for the packet forwarding system. Load balanced packets associated with each egress port are then sampled to generate sampled load balanced packets that are output from the egress port. For certain embodiments, a sampling percentage is used for the packet sampling, and the sampling percentage for each egress port is set based upon a comparison of a current traffic rate for the egress port to a threshold rate for the egress port. The threshold rates for the egress ports are allowed to be configured through a user interface. Further, session and non-session traffic can be identified, and session aware load balancing and/or per-port packet sampling can be applied.

Abstract: Systems and methods are disclosed to provide egress port overload protection for network packet forwarding systems. Input packets are received at one or more ingress ports and load balanced among a plurality of egress ports for the packet forwarding system. Load balanced packets associated with each egress port are then sampled to generate sampled load balanced packets that are output from the egress port. For certain embodiments, a sampling percentage is used for the packet sampling, and the sampling percentage for each egress port is set based upon a comparison of a current traffic rate for the egress port to a threshold rate for the egress port. The threshold rates for the egress ports are allowed to be configured through a user interface. Further, session and non-session traffic can be identified, and session aware load balancing and/or per-port packet sampling can be applied.