Self-healing Ethernet rings show promise for realizing the SONET/SDH-grade resilience in Carrier Ethernet infrastructures. However, when a ring is faulty, high-priority protection messages are processed in less time than low-priority data frames are processed. In this situation, any delayed data frames either being queued or traveling through long ring spans will cause the ring nodes to generate incorrect forwarding information. As a result, the data frames spread in the wrong direction, causing the ring to become unstable. To solve this problem, we propose four schemes, that is, dual flush, flush delay timer setting, purge triggering, and priority setting, and evaluate their protection performance under various traffic conditions on a ring based on the Ethernet ring protection (ERP) method. In addition, we develop an absorbing Markov chain model of the ERP protocol to observe how traffic congestion can impact the protection performance of the proposed priority setting scheme. Based on our observations, we propose a more reliable priority setting scheme, which guarantees faultless protection, even in a congested ring.