In order to identify classification quickly and accurately, an early traffic classification method (ETCM) is proposed. The method uses the payload size of three early packets and the server port number obtained from the TCP flow as flow feature, and classifies the traffic based on support vector machine (SVM). The results show that ETCM meets the following conditions: extracted features used, training samples selected without bias, Internet traffic related to WEB, MAIL, BitTorrent and eMule can be identified efficiently and quickly.