Replication of mirrored packets can, typically, affect performance and should be used carefully. Nokia routers minimize the impact of mirroring on performance by taking advantage of its distributed Flexible Fast Path technology. Flexible Fast Path forwarding allows efficient mirror service scaling and, at the same time, allows a large amount of data to be mirrored with minimal performance impact. When a mirror destination is configured, the packet slice option can truncate mirrored packets to the destination, which minimizes replication and tunneling overhead.