1. A method for distributing sets of regular expressions to a fixed number of state machine engines, the method comprising: combining, with a processing device, a plurality of regular expressions into a single compound regular expression; creating a single nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) including a plurality of NFA states based on the compound regular expression; performing an interference analysis for each pair of NFA states to identify all pairs of NFA states that would potentially interfere in an equivalent deterministic finite automaton (DFA); creating an interference graph representing all regular expressions associated with potentially interfering NFA states based on the results of the interference analysis; and performing a graph coloring algorithm on the interference graph to assign a different color to each represented regular expression in the graph.