excessively bursty traffic, see bandwidth management and congestion avoidance. Traffic shaping is commonly used in the network interfaces in hosts to prevent transmissions from exceeding the bandwidth or jitter limits and being discarded by traffic management functions in the network. (See scheduling (computing) and network scheduler.) The leaky bucket algorithm as a meter can also be used in a leaky bucket counter to measure the rate of random or stochastic processes. A Leaky bucket counter can be used to detect when the average or peak rate of events increases above some, acceptable, background level, i.e. when the bucket overflows. However, events that do not cause an overflow, i.e. have sufficiently low rates and are well distributed over time, can be ignored. For example, such a leaky bucket counter can be used to detect when there is a sudden burst of correctable memory errors or when there has been a gradual, but significant, increase in the average rate, which may indicate an impending failure, etc. The use of the leaky bucket algorithm in a leaky bucket counter is similar to that in traffic management, in that it is used as a meter. Essentially, the events replace the packets in the description, with each event causing a quantity of water to be added to the bucket. If the bucket would overflow, as a result of the event, then the event should trigger the action associated with an out-of-limits event. Some implementations seem to parallel Turner's description, in that there is no explicit limit on the maximum value that the counter may take, implying that once the counter has exceeded the threshold, it may not return to its previous state until a period significantly greater than the equivalent of the emission interval has passed, which may be increased by what would otherwise be conforming events. However, other implementations may not increment the counter while it is overflowed, allowing it to correctly determine whether the following events conform or not. Parameters In the case of the leaky bucket algorithm as a meter, the limits on the traffic can be bandwidth and a burstiness of the output. The bandwidth limit and burstiness limit for the connection may be specified in a traffic contract. A bandwidth limit may be specified as a packet or frame rate, a byte or bit rate, or as an emission interval between the packets. A limit on burstiness may be specified