At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN the proton bunches cross at a rate of 40 MHz. At the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment the original collision rate is reduced by a factor of O\mathcal{O} (1000) using a Level-1 hardware trigger. A subsequent factor of O\mathcal{O} (1000) data reduction is obtained by a software-implemented high level trigger (HLT) selection that is executed on a multi-processor farm. In this review we present in detail prototype CMS HLT physics selection algorithms, expected trigger rates and trigger performance in terms of both physics efficiency and timing.