The present disclosure describes a process and apparatus for improving insertions of entries into a hash table. A large number of smaller virtual buckets may be combined together and associated with buckets used for hash table entry lookups and/or entry insertion. On insertion of an entry, hash table entries associated with a hashed-to virtual bucket may be moved between groups of buckets associated with the virtual bucket, to better distribute entries across the available buckets to reduce the number of entries in the largest buckets and the standard deviation of the bucket sizes across the entire hash table.