A scheme for efficient implementation of workload partitioning between separate receive and transmit processors is provided so that a message can be effectively moved through a multiprocessor router. Generally, each receiving processor collects, into a digest, information relating to network protocol processing of a particular message, obtained via sequential byte processing of the message at the time of reception of the message. The information placed into the digest is information that is necessary for the completion of the processing tasks to be performed by the processor of the transmitting line card. The digest is passed to the transmit processor through a buffer exchange between the receive and transmit processors. The transmit processor reads the digest before processing of the related message for transmission and uses the information in the network protocol processing of the message. Thus, the transmit processor does not have to "look ahead" to bytes of the message needed to complete certain processing functions already completed by the receive processor and does require extra buffering and/or memory bandwidth to make the modifications to the message.