Dear all, What is the difference between buffering and spooling? Though referred the Operating System concepts book by Silberschatz I didnt get.... Please explain me clearly.... It was mentioned that... Buffering overlaps the I/O of a job with its own computation where as Spooling overlaps the I/O of one job with the computation of other jobs. still...i didnt get... kindly explain in detail
Say you are seeing a video file which can be broken into 2 tasks. 1. Loading the part of the whole file into the memory and 2. Display it. Now when the loading overlaps with the I/O its buffering. Spooling is Say you are trying to print a document but your PC can print the job much faster than the actual hardware can complete the job and so your PC cannot wait for the job to complete and so it spools the complete job and return back to some other work and that may be saving the file or other thing.
Buffering is a method of overlapping the computation of a job with its execution. It temporarily stores input or output data in an attempt to better match the speeds of two devices such as a fast CPU and a slow disk drive. If, for example, the CPU writes information to the buffer, it can continue in its computation while the disk drive stores the information. With spooling, the disk is used as a very large buffer. Usually complete jobs are queued on disk to be completed later. A typical example is the spooler for a printer. When a print job is issued, the spooler takes care of it, sending it to the printer if it is not busy, or storing it on disk otherwise. The main difference between buffering and spooling is that the latter allows the I/O of one job to overlap the computation of another. Buffering only allows the I/O of a job to overlap with its own computation.
