Method and apparatus to support a large Internet Protocol Forwarding Information Base. A packet is received at a network device, the packet including a destination address. A table is indexed into using a portion of the destination address to locate an entry in the table associated with the portion of the destination address. A pool index is derived from the portion of the destination address and is used to identify a pool of data blocks from among a plurality of pools of data blocks. The entry and the pool of data blocks are navigated to find a next-hop for the packet.