Local messaging in a scheduling hierarchy in a traffic manager of a network processor

Described embodiments provide for queuing tasks in a scheduling hierarchy of a network processor. A traffic manager generates a tree scheduling hierarchy having a root scheduler and N scheduler levels. The network processor generates tasks corresponding to received packets. The traffic manager performs a task enqueue operation for the task. The task enqueue operation includes adding the received task to an associated queue of the scheduling hierarchy, where the queue is associated with a data flow of the received task. The queue has a corresponding scheduler level M, where M is a positive integer less than or equal to N. Starting at the queue and iteratively repeating at each scheduling level until reaching the root scheduler, each node in the scheduling hierarchy maintains an actual count of tasks corresponding to the node. Each node communicates a capped task count to a corresponding parent scheduler at a relative next scheduler level.