Buffer is a temporary storage area in memory used to hold data while it's being moved from one place to another. It's commonly used to smooth out differences in data flow rates, like when streaming video from a server that sends data faster than your device can display it.

How to use it in a sentence

• I was trying to watch the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix, but the video kept pausing to buffer every 30 seconds - guess my Internet connection is about as reliable as Twitter's uptime these days.

• Bob's brilliant idea to buffer all the log data in memory before writing it to disk worked great - until the server crashed and he realized he'd just lost 4 hours worth of critical debugging info. Oops.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Martin Fowler has an article on Reporting Database that discusses using a separate database with a schema optimized for reporting, which can help avoid performance issues caused by buffering large result sets from an operational DB.

• The Iterate library provides a set of powerful looping macros for Common Lisp that can be used to efficiently process data in buffers and other collections.

• For a deeper dive into how buffering is used in streaming video, check out this white paper from the A/B Testing Hub that covers the tradeoffs between buffer size, latency, and video quality.

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