Abstract: A saturation metric that represents a degree of saturation in a low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoding system that uses a fixed-point number representation is determined. The saturation metric is compared against a saturation threshold. In the event the saturation metric exceeds the saturation threshold, at the end of a decoding iteration, a message is more aggressively attenuated compared to when the saturation metric does not exceed the saturation threshold in order to produce an attenuated message. In the event the saturation metric does not exceed the saturation threshold, at the end of the decoding iteration, the message is less aggressively attenuated compared to when the saturation metric does exceed the saturation threshold in order to produce the attenuated message.