To decode a manifestation of a codeword in which K information bits are encoded as N>K codeword bits, messages are exchanged between N bit nodes and N−K check nodes. During computation, messages are expressed with a full message length greater than two bits. In each iteration, representations of at least some of the exchanged messages are stored. For at least one node, if representations of messages sent from that node are stored, then the representation of one or more of the messages is stored using at least two bits but using fewer bits than the full message length, and the representation of one other message is stored with full message length. Preferably, the messages that are stored using fewer bits than the full message length are messages sent from check nodes.