About
Buffers are catalog containers of a (fixed|variable with max) amount of data or operations.
Without buffer, each read or write request is handled directly by the underlying layer (OS, Database, …) . This can make a program much less efficient, since each such request often triggers other operations that may be relatively expensive.. For instance, for an OS layer
- disk access,
- network activity,
- or some other operation
Furthermore, if requested data were sent as single big chunks, only one user could process it at a time, which obviously would make the application very inefficient and not much fun to use. (ie only one user would download data)
Example of buffered data:
- Byte arrays
- Database: Database - Fetch Size
- Network: Network - Data unit
Articles Related
List of buffer implementation
Flush Operation
Flushing the buffer means that you write data to an entity (mostly a file).