Systems and methods of reducing service jitter in WFQ scheduling schemes used in packet traffic management are described. Service jitter is the variance in time between when a queue should have been selected for servicing and when it was actually serviced. The service jitter is generally not a problem in lower speed applications but in a high speed implementation such as a OC192 device latency can lead to downstream service contract violations. According to the invention jitter is controlled by applying a dampening factor to a difference amount that is used by the WFQ process to adjust its timing of queue selection. The difference amount is queue-specific and is a running difference between calculated and actual queue servicing times.