Alleviating Memory-Access Congestion in Network Devices

A network device includes one or more ports, processing circuitry, and a memory-network congestion controller. The one or more ports are to connect to a network. The processing circuitry is to run a plurality of processing tasks that access a shared memory, one or more of the processing tasks including communicating one or more packet flows over the network. The memory-network congestion controller is to identify a memory-access congestion, which occurs in accessing the shared memory by one or more of the processing tasks, and to alleviate the memory-access congestion by causing a reduction in a communication rate of at least one of the packet flows.