Ethernet ring protection (ERP) technology, which is defined in ITU-T Recommendation G.8032, has been developed to provide carrier grade recovery for Ethernet ring networks. However, the filtering database (FDB) flush method adopted in the current ERP standard has the drawback of introducing a large amount of transient traffic overshoot caused by flooded Ethernet frames right after protection switching. This traffic overshooting is especially critical when a ring provides services to a large number of clients. According to our experimental results, the traditional FDB flush requires a link capacity about sixteen times greater than the steady state traffic bandwidth. This paper introduces four flush optimization schemes to resolve this issue and investigates how the proposed schemes deal with the transient traffic overshoot on a multi-ring network under failure conditions. With a network simulator, we evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes and compare them to the conventional FDB flush scheme. Among the proposed methods, the extended FDB advertisement method shows the fastest and most stable protection switching performance.