Buffer

I feel like I see this term quite a lot. See unlinked mentions.

A buffer in computing is a temporary storage area used to hold data while it is being transferred between two locations or manipulated.

See IO Buffering.

Commonly used:

  • I/O operations
  • networking
  • data streaming to manage the flow of data
  • improve system performance

Buffer vs. Queue?

pretty much the same. When we refer to buffer, these usually have a fixed size, and if they overflow, you either lose data (if not handled properly) or block further writes.

  • I mean queues too in the context of like Pub-Sub architecture, you set a max queue size. That queue is essentially a buffer

Concepts