Cut-through switches start forwarding after reading just the destination MAC. That's only bytes into the frame. They don't wait for the full frame or check the FCS. Latency is fixed and minimal regardless of frame size. The downside: corrupt frames get forwarded. Fragment-free is a hybrid that waits for bytes to catch collision fragments. High-frequency trading uses cut-through.
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$ curl repovive.com/roadmaps/network-design/physical-and-data-link-fundamentals/cut-through-switching
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