The present invention is directed to synchronizing notification messages transmitted to egress control units to allow an even distribution of the messages. A plurality of packet buffer units (PBUs) may concurrently transmit notification messages to a particular egress control unit in response to packets received from a plurality of ingress control units. Each PBU includes a notification queue associated with the egress control unit for storing notifications generated by the PBU. Notifications in the notification queues are ordered according to the ingress units triggering the notifications. Notifications in each notification queue are retrieved via a time-driven pointer that is initialized to a different start entry position for the notification queues in each PBU. This allows each PBU to transmit, at any given time, notifications to the egress control unit that are associated with a different ingress unit. The receiving egress control unit maintains a plurality of memory units for concurrently storing of a portion of the received notification messages based on their associated ingress input units.