A hierarchical pipelined distributed scheduling traffic manager includes multiple hierarchical levels to perform hierarchical winner selection and propagation in a pipeline including selecting and propagating winner queues of a lower level to subsequent levels to determine one final winning queue. The winner selection and propagation is performed in parallel between the levels to reduce the time required in selecting the final winning queue. In some embodiments, the hierarchical traffic manager is separated into multiple separate sliced hierarchical traffic managers to distributively process the traffic.