A system and method for updating forwarding tables in a blade packet manager is provided. The blade packet manager may include master and slave blades. A master management module on the master blade monitors the slave blades. Network address entry forwarding tables are maintained on the slave blades. A periodic sweep of slave blades for activity information is performed and reports are forwarded to the master blade. The master blade propagates the reported information from the master blade to each of the slave blades to update forwarding tables on each of the slave blades.