1. An apparatus comprising: forwarding mechanism hardware circuitry to perform at least one forwarding operation involving, at least in part, received traffic, the forwarding operation being determined based at least in part upon programming provided, at least in part, by at least one hardware controller, the programming being based at least in part upon at least one policy, the at least one forwarding operation being in accordance with the following subparagraphs (a) to (d): (a) after the circuitry has previously forwarded, at least in part, at least one previous time the received traffic, the at least one forwarding operation comprising again forwarding, at least in part, the received traffic to at least one processing mechanism of a plurality of processing mechanisms associated at least in part with a network to process the received traffic, the again forwarding being based at least in part upon at least one port via which the received traffic was previously at least partially received, at least one portion of contents of the received traffic, and the programming, the plurality of processing mechanisms comprising at least one hardware offload engine to perform in hardware certain processing operations in lieu of the certain processing operations being performed, at least in part, by a central processing unit CPU and/or software, the certain processing operations comprising one or more of the following: compression operations, decompression operations, secure socket layer operations, encryption operations, decryption operations, search operations, and/or comparison operations; (b) after receiving, at least in part, at multiple respective times the received traffic via a given port, the at least one forwarding operation comprising respectively forwarding, at least in part, by the forwarding mechanism hardware circuitry, the received traffic to different ones of the plurality of the processing mechanisms; (c) the at least one forwarding operation comprising multiple forwarding operations by the forwarding mechanism hardware circuitry to forward, at least in part, the received traffic to multiple of the plurality of the processing mechanisms in a sequence order that permits a combined processing to be carried out that satisfies the at least one policy; and (d) the at least one forwarding operation comprising providing, at least in part, by the forwarding mechanism hardware circuitry, in association, at least in part, with the received traffic at least one indication of at least one processing operation associated with the at least one processing mechanism, the at least one indication to be used, at least in part, in a subsequent forwarding operation of the forwarding mechanism circuitry; wherein: a subset of the plurality of processing mechanisms is selected to process the received traffic based at least in part upon: the at least one policy; at least one capability of at least one platform; and whether offload is available at the at least one platform.