A system and method are described for work conserving, load balancing, and scheduling by a network processor. For example, one embodiment of a system includes a plurality of processing cores, including a scheduling circuit, at least one source processing core that generates at least one task and at least one destination processing core that receives and processes the at least one task, and generates a response. The scheduling circuit of the exemplary system receives the at least one task and conducts a load balancing to select the at least one destination processing core. In an embodiment, the scheduling circuit further detects a critical sequences of tasks, schedules those tasks to be processed by a single destination processing core, and, upon completion of the critical sequence, conducts another load balancing to potentially select a different processing core to process more tasks.