Abstract: An apparatus for memory management in network systems provides added margins of reliability for the receipt of vital maintenance operations protocol (MOP) and station management packets (SMP). In addition, additional overflow allocations of buffers are assigned for receipt of critical system packets which otherwise would typically be discarded in the event of a highly congested system. Thus, if a MOP or a SMP packet is received from the network when the allocated space for storing these types of packets in full, the packets are stored in the overflow allocations, and thus the critical packets are not lost.