What is the advantage of buffering?

Buffering in Java I/O reduces the number of low-level input/output operations, significantly increasing performance. Reading/writing large blocks of data in a single system call is more efficient than multiple small operations.

When reading: BufferedInputStream reads data from the underlying stream into a buffer. When small portions of data are requested, they are taken from the buffer, avoiding the need to access the source (disk, network) each time. Only when the buffer is empty does it read a new block of data.

When writing: BufferedOutputStream first writes data to the buffer. The data is then written to the underlying stream either when the buffer is full or when the flush() method is called. This minimizes the number of system write calls.

Advantages:

• Reduced overhead: Decreases the number of calls to the OS and hardware.
• Increased throughput: Data is transmitted in larger blocks.
• Improved performance: Overall input/output operation time is reduced.

Example of using BufferedInputStream:

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;

public class BufferedReaderExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try (FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream("example.txt");
             BufferedInputStream bufferedInputStream = new BufferedInputStream(fileInputStream)) {

            int data;
            while ((data = bufferedInputStream.read()) != -1) {
                // Processing the read byte
                System.out.print((char) data);
            }

        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}