Method and apparatus for preventing congestion in load-balancing networks

The invention includes a method and apparatus for processing traffic in a load-balancing network comprising a plurality of nodes. The method includes determining an egress node associated with each of a plurality of packets of a traffic flow received at an ingress node of the plurality of nodes, determining, for each packet, whether a congestion condition exists on the egress node, and processing the packets such that packets associated with egress nodes for which the congestion condition does not exist have a different queuing priority within the load-balancing network than packets associated with egress nodes for which the congestion condition exists. The ingress node on which the traffic flow is received is adapted for splitting the traffic flow into a plurality of traffic flow portions independent of the egress node by which each packet is scheduled to exit the load-balancing network.