Reports, as a formatted string, the current rate of packets being processed by the gateway in packets per second, rather than a cumulative count. Because it's a rate rather than a running total, this is the value an admin actually watches on a live dashboard to see current load in real time, without having to compute a delta between two polls of a cumulative counter like fwAccepted. Example: fwPacketsRate reading '45000 pps' during a monitored traffic surge gives an immediate live-load figure, whereas fwAccepted alone would only show a large cumulative number that needs two samples to turn into a rate.