Buffering vs Caching
In general, buffering is the process of holding data in a region of the memory until the data is transported from one place to another. Buffering is used when moving data between processes in the computer and in telecommunication. Typically, buffering is required when there is difference between the speeds in which the data is received and data is processed. Caching is the process of storing data in a separate place (called the cache) such that they could be accessed faster if the same data is requested in the future. When some data is requested, the cache is first checked to see whether it contains that data. If data is already in the cache, the request can be satisfied faster.
What is Buffering?
Buffering is the process of holding data in a region of the memory until the data is transported from one place to another. This region of memory that holds the data is called a buffer. Buffering is used when there is a difference between the speed in which the data is received and the speed in which the data is processed. Even though buffering can be implemented using hardware buffers or software buffers, most widely used are the software buffers. Buffering is widely used in printer spooler, online video streaming and telecommunication (when transferring data from one device to another). Most of the time, buffering is done by writing data in to a queue in one speed and reading the data from the queue in another speed.
What is Caching?
Caching is the process of storing data in a separate place (called the cache) such that they could be accessed faster if the same data is requested in the future. When some data is requested, the cache is first checked to see whether it contains that data. If data is already in the cache, it is called a cache hit. Then the data can be retrieved from the cache, which is much faster than retrieving it from the original storage location. If the requested data is not in the cache, it is called a cache miss. Then the data needs to be fetched from the original storage location, which would take a longer time. Caching is used in different places. In the CPU, caching is used to improve the performance by reducing the time taken to get data from the main memory. In web browsers, web caching is used to store responses from previous visits to web sites, in order to make the next visits faster.
What’s the difference between Buffering and Caching?
Even though both caching and buffering involves storing data temporally in a different location, they have some important differences. Caching is done to reduce the access time in retrieving data from a slower storage device. It is based on the principle that the same data will be accessed multiple times thus storing them in cache would reduce the access time largely. Buffering is mainly used to overcome the difference between the speeds in which the data is received and data is processed by a device.