BufferedInputStream

A buffered input stream that reads data from an underlying input stream. Instead of reading one byte at a time from the underlying input stream, BufferedInputStream reads a larger block of bytes into an internal buffer. This can improve the performance of reading data from the underlying input stream.

The BufferedInputStream class

The BufferedInputStream class is a subclass of InputStream that reads data from an underlying input stream. It provides a buffer for reading data from the underlying input stream.

val inputStream: InputStream = ...
val bufferedStream = inputStream.bufferedStream

It has all the methods of the InputStream class.

The default buffer size is 8192 bytes. You can modify the size of the buffer by passing the buffer size as a parameter to the constructor:

val inputStream: InputStream = ...
val bufferedStream = BufferedInputStream(inputStream, bufferSize = 1024)

The buffer size must be greater than zero. It is a good practice to use a buffer size that is a power of 2.

To choose an appropriate buffer size, you can experiment with different buffer sizes and measure the performance. Generally speaking, a larger buffer size can improve the performance of reading data from the underlying input, while using more memory. A smaller buffer size can reduce memory usage but will result in more frequent reads and therefore slower performance. The default buffer size of 8192 (8 KB) is a good starting point.

When to use BufferedInputStream

The real benefit of BufferedInputStream is that it reads data from the underlying input stream in larger blocks. This can improve the performance of reading data from the underlying input stream. It is recommended to use BufferedInputStream when you read data from sources with high latency, such as network connections or files. But if you read data from a byte array or a ByteArrayInputStream, you don't need to use BufferedInputStream.