Sure thing, let’s break it down piece by piece. First off, 512 bytes of RAM is tight, but not impossible if you strip Paxos down to the bare essentials—just the propose, accept, and learn phases, and maybe drop the leader election for now. If you encode everything in a small struct—say a 2‑byte proposal id, a 2‑byte value, and a few flags—you’re already under 16 bytes per instance. With five nodes that’s 80 bytes for state, plus a small queue for incoming messages. The trick is to make every message self‑contained so you don’t need dynamic allocation. For determinism, run the protocol in a single thread and avoid any OS‑level scheduling quirks. And to beat gossip, cache the last accepted value locally and only broadcast when you actually advance the log. That should keep the message overhead low and the RAM usage predictable. Does that line up with what you had in mind, or are you thinking of a different optimization?