It shouldn't? I have 10M to 10G in the same ethernet collision domain everything works at appropriate speeds (my 10G hosts don't always hit 10G cause some of them have anemic cpus, but that's a different story). Most of my switches are cheap gigE switches, not the 10G stuff obviously, so cheap isn't the problem.
Only thing is if some equipment thought ethernet pause frames were a good idea... Send too much traffic to a low speed switch port and get a pause frame will tend to stop all outbound traffic which is not helpful. Not a lot of things send or respect pause frames though...
Imagine 5 devices that all push at 100mbit in 100 milliseconds (1gig linerate) to the target 1gig connected device, then nothing for 900ms.
On paper they are feeding 100mbit a second each to a target receiving 500mbit a second. Easily fits in a 1gig link.
But because of the timing you've got to transmit 500mbit in 100ms, or a peak speed of 5gbit.
So instead you have to buffer and delay the packets. Your near-zero latency increases to 400ms, and your switch needs about 400mbit (50MB) of buffer, or over 30,000 packets of buffer space.
You'd need a very high end switch to avoid any drops in that situation.
Again, a cheapo non reputable switch probably runs with whatever settings got it working the first time with no follow up testing. Networking algorithms are an area where the simple dumb thing mostly works except in edge cases and adversarial situations, and the right/proper way to do things is fiendishly complex.
> I’m not an expert on switching algorithms
then you surely shouldn't tell about 'various algos'
And no, no amount of software magik would help if your L1 can't handle the traffic.
And even in cheap switches (think Realtek / Broadcom chips in $30 switches) they have dynamic shared pools. An elephant flow can exhaust some of that pool, but even the cheap stuff won't allow a single port to exhaust all resources as claimed.
10Gb to 100Gb UDP? Sure... Maybe in this scenario you end up with some odd behavior, but this isn't going to be normal usage. We've got PAUSE frames, congestion control and hardware that's been doing this for decades. Even on the cheap switching. It is imperative to have a router, however that actually deals with buffer bloat appropriately and as your Internet pipe scales you want to be cognizant your router can handle queuing appropriately at those line rates.
But ultimately...
> A 10G host sending large data to a 100M peer will cause all packets between all other peers to drop once switch memory is filled up.
...is not true. Switches don't work like that.
This is the biggest problem with those cheap network interfaces in tvs. They dont have any form of usable buffer, so a spike instantly creates problems.
using an usb network dongle (or if your setup is good enough wifi, but this is very unstable)
Also, most tv's are not able to push the full 100Mbps over their network interface.