Patent 7623538 was granted and assigned to Sun Microsystems on November, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Incoming/outgoing data packets to/from a network are processed by associated receive/send rings of a network interface. A plurality of counters, disposed in hardware, are each associated with particular receive/send rings. Each of the plurality of counters maintains a count of a number of data packets processed by an associated receive/send ring.