The present invention provides a rule set partitioning based packet classification method for Internet. The method comprising: performing Horizontal Cut for the rule set, determining the field for partitioning a rule layer based on a target algorithm and selecting the partition manner of the Horizontal Cut, performing Horizontal Cut according to the selected partition manner of the Horizontal Cut, thereby obtaining more than one rule layers, each rule layer being a Horizontal subset, combining the rule layers to obtain a plurality of Horizontal subsets according to the total number of the pre-designated Horizontal subsets and a predefined principle, wherein the total number of said combined plurality of Horizontal subsets equals to the total number of said pre-designated Horizontal subsets; performing Vertical Cut in each of the Horizontal subsets; then forming a Hash table that can index the Vertical subsets, so that it can be used in a lookup; and realizing rule storage in each Vertical subset respectively according to the target algorithm.