Just Java™ 2

Memory Mapped I/O

Let's return to the topic of memory-mapped I/O. We stated that file channels/buffers are an alternative to reads/writes on streams. Memory-mapped I/O is an alternative to both, implemented as a refinement to channels/buffers. The whole point of mapped I/O is faster I/O. When transferring large amounts of data, mapped I/O can be faster because it uses virtual memory to make the file contents appear in your address space. It takes some initial setup and puts more work on the virtual memory subsystem, but mapped I/O avoids the extra copying from buffers in kernel memory into buffers in your process.

When you read with a stream, the OS reads from the disk into a buffer owned by the device driver and then moves the contents ...