Described herein are systems and methods for use with a load balancer or traffic director, and administration thereof. In accordance with an embodiment the system comprises a traffic director having one or more traffic director instances, which is configured to receive and communicate requests, from clients, to origin servers having one or more pools of servers. A traffic monitor, at the traffic director, monitors traffic, including the number of connections, between the traffic director instances and one or more of the resource servers within the origin servers. The traffic director can set a traffic rate which controls the traffic, including the number of connections, to provide surge protection, or rate acceleration/deceleration.