ASSIGNING RESOURCES TO ITEMS SUCH AS PROCESSING CONTEXTS FOR PROCESSING PACKETS

Disclosed are, inter alia, methods, apparatus, data structures, computer-readable media, and mechanisms, for matching items with resources, such as, but not limited to packet processing contexts, output links, memory, storage, specialized hardware or software, compute cycles, or any other entity. One implementation includes means for maintaining distribution groups of items, means for maintaining differently aged resources queues, and means for matching resources identified as being at the head of the plurality of differently aged resources queues and as being primarily and secondarily associated with said distribution groups based on a set of predetermined criteria. For example, even though processing contexts can be shared among different distribution groups of packets, by giving preference to assigning recently used processing contexts for processing packets of a same distribution group, it is more likely that the processing instructions are already in the memory of this processing context, and therefore, processing will not be delayed until such instructions are retrieved into memory.