One aspect of the instant application provides a system and method for managing a switch buffer. During operation, the system establishes a hierarchical accounting structure to determine utilizations of different elements of a buffer on the switch. The hierarchical accounting structure comprises one or more parent elements, and each parent element is associated with one or more child elements. The system determines a base utilization of a child element based on an amount of buffer space allocated to the child element and an amount of buffer space used by the child element, and determines an adaptive utilization of the child element based at least on the base utilization of the child element and a congestion state of a corresponding parent element. Determining the adaptive utilization of the child element comprises performing a table lookup operation. The system then stores a received packet associated with the child element in the buffer in response to the adaptive utilization of the child element being less than a predetermined threshold.