two features of the processing means 2 are in this presentation referred to as a first and a second resource r 1 r 2 a resource as understood in this presentation can be any of a large amount of different types of features and a few examples are given herein in addition in general the processing means can present more than two resources see below with reference to fig3 one or more of the resources r 1 r 2 can be processing elements adapted to process data alternatively one or more of the resources r 1 r 2 can be performance parameters related to the processing means 2 in this embodiment of the invention both performance parameters are performance parameters more specifically the first resource r 1 is the bit rate capacity of the processing means 2 and the second resource r 2 is the packet rate capacity of the processing means 2 the processing means 2 can be any of a variety of known types including an asynchronous processing pipeline as described in said international patent application no pct se2005 001969 incorporated herein by reference thereby any or all of the resources r 1 r 2 can be performance parameters related to the processing means 2 or processing elements of the processing pipeline the amount of which can be considerably larger than two any of such processing elements can be an access point for access to a processing device or engine as describes in wo2004 010288 included herein by reference alternatively the processing means 2 can be a risc reduced instruction set computer processor microcoded engine hardcoded engine or a combination of multiple processing means of one type or many types data traffic is forwarded from left.