Aspects of the technology provide systems and methods for interleaving a processing task in a network monitoring appliance. A process of the technology could include steps for identifying operators in the network monitoring appliance, wherein the operators are sequentially arranged to form a processing pipeline, determining an epoch for the processing pipeline, wherein the epoch corresponds with a time duration required for a processing task to traverse the pipeline, and determining a time window in which a supplemental processing task can be interleaved into the processing pipeline, wherein the time window is based on the epoch. Machine-readable media are also provided.