Summary: For uniform traffic, ATM switches employing shared buffering have lower cell loss probability and better buffer utilization than other buffering strategies. However, the performance of shared-buffer switches degrades dramatically under non-uniform traffic. Traffic nonuniformity is inherent in telecommunications, and is likely to be present in ATM networks because of the different characteristics of traffic sources such as video, voice and data. A number of buffer management schemes which are designed to overcome the adverse effect of non-uniform traffic in shared-buffer ATM switches have been proposed and studied. We analyse the pushout technique to purge hot-spot cells which unfairly occupy the buffer. We call it Hot-Spot Pushout (HSPO). We develop an analytical model for buffer sharing with and without HSPO under non-uniform traffic and validate it using simulation. We also simulate other buffer sharing schemes available in the literature and show that HSPO performs consistently better than all of them in the presence of non-uniform traffic.