Pulse Counters

A non-transitory machine-readable medium having executable instructions to cause one or more processing units to perform a method to write to a plurality of counters in a network element, the method comprising:

• generating counter data and a plurality of labels for a plurality of counters in a network element, wherein each of the plurality of labels corresponds to one of the one of the plurality of counters;
• and
• for each of the plurality of labels,
• allocating a memory reference for one of the plurality of counters that corresponds to that label,
• storing this label and the memory reference in a lookup table, and
• writing the counter data for the corresponding one of the plurality of counters using the memory reference in a shared memory table in shared memory of the network element, wherein multiple readers read the counter data by performing a lookup of this label for the memory reference using the lookup table.

A method to read a plurality of counters in a network element, the method comprising:

• receiving a plurality of labels from a client, wherein each of the plurality of labels corresponds to one of the one of the plurality of counters, the plurality of counters is stored in a shared memory table in shared memory of the network element, and a writer writes counter data for each of the plurality of counters to the shared memory table;
• for each of the plurality of labels,
• performing a lookup of that label for a memory reference to a corresponding counter that is one of the plurality of counters, and
• retrieving the memory reference for the corresponding counter;
• reading the counter data for plurality of counters using the plurality of memory references;
• and
• sending the counter data to the client.

A method to write to a plurality of counters in a network element, the method comprising:

• generating counter data and a plurality of labels for a plurality of counters in a network element, wherein each of the plurality of labels corresponds to one of the one of the plurality of counters;
• and
• for each of the plurality of labels,
• allocating a memory reference for one of the plurality of counters that corresponds to that label,
• storing this label and the memory reference in a lookup table, and
• writing the counter data for the corresponding one of the plurality of counters using the memory reference in a shared memory table in shared memory of the network element, wherein multiple readers read the counter data by performing a lookup of this label for the memory reference using the lookup table.