Sketch table for traffic profiling and measurement

One embodiment provides a network system. The network system includes an application layer to execute one or more networking applications to generate or receive data packets having flow identification (ID) information; and a packet processing layer having profiling circuitry to generate a sketch table indicative of packet flow count data; the sketch table having a plurality of buckets, each bucket includes a first section including a plurality of data fields, each data field of the first section to store flow ID and packet count data, each bucket also having a second section having a plurality of data fields, each data field of the second section to store packet count data.