with reference now to fig5 a diagram of a rule is depicted in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention rule 500 includes conditions 502 and actions 504 when conditions 502 for a policy rule evaluate to true then all of the actions for that rule are performed in the order in which they appear in actions 504 turning next to fig6 a flowchart of a process used for processing packets is depicted in accordance is with a preferred embodiment of the present invention the process illustrated in fig6 may be implemented in a policy agent such as policy agent 306 in fig3 the process begins by receiving a request from a requester step 600 this request is in the form of a packet containing a request the request may originate from a client but in the example configuration shown in fig1 it is received from a network dispatcher a determination is made as to whether a quality of service qos cookie is present in the request step 602 a qos cookie is a cookie containing results from a prior classification as well as a hash value used to identify a complete policy configuration for an edge server if a qos cookie is present a determination is then made as to whether the qos cookie is valid step 604 in some cases the qos cookie may be invalid because the.