US Patent 9934273 Metadata synchronization in flow management systems

An iteratively updated metadata collection is used for making packet rewriting decisions at a flow management system. In a particular iteration at a particular rewriting decisions node of the system, metadata representing older local decisions is discarded, and metadata representing notifications of older rewriting decisions which were received at a different tier is also discarded. Representations of more recent local decisions and more recent notifications received at the different tier are added to the metadata collection during the particular iteration. New rewriting decisions are made using aggregations of the objects in the metadata collection.