Chapter 3. Buffered I/O

Recall from Chapter 1 that the block, a filesystem abstraction, is the lingua franca of I/O—all disk operations occur in terms of blocks. Consequently, I/O performance is optimal when requests are issued on block-aligned boundaries in integer multiples of the block size.

Performance degradation is exacerbated by the increased number of system calls required to read, say, a single byte 1,024 times rather than 1,024 bytes all at once. Even a series of operations performed in a size larger than a block can be suboptimal if the size is not an integer multiple of the block size. For example, if the block size is one kilobyte, operations in chunks of 1,130 bytes may still be slower than 1,024 byte operations.