A simple and efficient active statistics counter architecture named DALCA (direct addressing layered counter array) is presented for high speed network traffic analysis and management. The novelty of DALCA is that the counter vector is split up into multiple layers, and all layers except the first one are organized as multi-level hash tables. This makes DALCA efficient in both from the space and time perspective. DALCA has similar space efficiency and significantly higher time efficiency compared with BRICK;the state-of- the-art active statistics counter architecture. The performance of DALCA is evaluated using real world backbone network traffic traces. Simulation results show that the memory bandwidth demand of DALCA is about 1/10 and 1/6 that of BRICK during query and update operations respectively.