Advantages of Buffering
- Buffering significantly reduces the waiting time for a process or application to access a device in the system
- Smoothens the I/O operations between the different devices that are connected to the system.
- Using Buffer number of calls needed for carrying out an operation, so it increases the overall performance of the system.
- Buffering helps cut down on the number of I/O operations that are needed to access the desired data.
Buffering in OS
In Operating Systems I/O operations are one of the most fundamental tasks that is needed to be carried out correctly and with the utmost efficiency. One of the techniques that we can use to ensure the utmost efficiency of the I/O Operations is Buffering. So, Buffering is a process in which the data is stored in a buffer or cache, which makes this stored data more accessible than the original source. Buffer is an area in memory that is used to hold the data that is being transmitted from one place to another and store the data temporarily.
There are a number of data storage devices that are used in a system, like Hard Disks, network devices, pen drives, etc. So, there might be some waiting time faced by the processes or applications that are attempting to access that data from the storage devices. This problem is mainly caused when the devices from where device is slow or have low latency.
This problem is significantly solved using Buffering, as in this process the buffer acts as an intermediate between the storage device and the processes/applications. In this process, the data is already transferred to the Buffer so the data retrieval can be done from it which significantly reduces the waiting time and hence improves the performance of the system.