Question

I learned that by default I/O in programs is buffered, i.e they are served from a temporary storage to the requesting program.
I understand that buffering improves IO performance (maybe by reducing system calls). I have seen examples of disabling buffering, like setvbuf in C. What is the difference between the two modes and when should one be used over the other?

Answer 1

You want unbuffered output whenever you want to ensure that the output has been written before continuing. One example is standard error under a C runtime library – this is usually unbuffered by default. Since errors are (hopefully) infrequent, you want to know about them immediately. On the other hand, standard output is buffered simply because it’s assumed there will be far more data going through it.

Another example is a logging library. If your log messages are held within buffers in your process, and your process dumps core, there a very good chance that output will never be written.

In addition, it’s not just system calls that are minimized but disk I/O as well. Let’s say a program reads a file one byte at a time. With unbuffered input, you will go out to the (relatively very slow) disk for every byte even though it probably has to read in a whole block anyway (the disk hardware itself may have buffers but you’re still going out to the disk controller which is going to be slower than in-memory access).

By buffering, the whole block is read in to the buffer at once then the individual bytes are delivered to you from the (in-memory, incredibly fast) buffer area.

Keep in mind that buffering can take many forms, such as in the following example:

+-------------------+-------------------+
| Process A         | Process B         |
+-------------------+-------------------+
| C runtime library | C runtime library | C RTL buffers
+-------------------+-------------------+
|               OS caches               | Operating system buffers
+---------------------------------------+
|      Disk controller hardware cache   | Disk hardware buffers
+---------------------------------------+
|                   Disk                |
+---------------------------------------+