A method for controlling congestion in a datacenter network or server is described. The server includes a processor configured to host a plurality of virtual machines and an ingress engine configured to maintain a plurality of per-virtual machine queues configured to store received packets. The processor is also configured to execute a CPU-fair fair queuing process to control the processing of the packets by the processor. The processor is also configured to selectively trigger temporary packet per second packet transmission limits on top of a substantially continuously enforced bit per second transmission limit upon detection of a per virtual machine queue overload.