CONFIGURING AND PERFORMING CHARACTER PATTERN RECOGNITION IN A DATA PLANE CIRCUIT

Some embodiments of the invention provide a data plane circuit for a network forwarding element that searches for one or more patterns of characters stored in data messages received by the data plane circuit. In some embodiments, the data plane circuit analyzes the data messages as it processes the data messages to forward the data messages to their destinations in a network. Because the data messages are already flowing through the network, it is optimal to search the data messages for the character patterns as the data messages pass through the network, instead of performing these operations on a separate set of servers that typically perform these searches at slower rates. In other embodiments, the data plane circuit does not perform its character pattern searches in conjunction with its forwarding operations, as it receives the data messages from a set of servers just for the purpose of performing its character pattern searches, in order to offload some or all of these searches from the server set.