is << on filestreams a blocking operation?

[monade]

Hi,
i have a file stream
std::ofstream file
and some data
std::string data
to serialize in a performance sensitive code section:
file << data << '\n'
I know that the data will be flushed when the streambuffer is full and
that writing to hard disk takes some time. Is the last line a
potentially blocking operation and if so, how do I avoid this?
My STL implementation is from visual c++.

[mlimber]

[e-mail] wrote:

Hi,
i have a file stream
std::ofstream file
and some data
std::string data
to serialize in a performance sensitive code section:
file << data << '\n'
I know that the data will be flushed when the streambuffer is full and
that writing to hard disk takes some time. Is the last line a
potentially blocking operation and if so, how do I avoid this?
My STL implementation is from visual c++.

You want to delay the actual writing to a file on the hard disk? You
could just stream the object to a std::ostringstream, which would exist
only in memory, until you're willing to write the file. Then you can
flush the fstream to make sure all the disk access is complete.

Cheers! --M

[Peter Jansson]

mo****@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,
i have a file stream
std::ofstream file
and some data
std::string data
to serialize in a performance sensitive code section:
file << data << '\n'
I know that the data will be flushed when the streambuffer is full and
that writing to hard disk takes some time. Is the last line a
potentially blocking operation and if so, how do I avoid this?
My STL implementation is from visual c++.

Hi,
Looking at section 27.8.1.4, item 8, in the standard then I would
*guess* that it depends on your implementation of "a_codecvt.out(...)".
Perhaps you can try the sensitive code on you particular problem?

Regards,
Peter Jansson

[monade]

Thanks for your answer,
unfortunately there is no way for me to decide when its a good moment
to flush the stream. Its a data collection application from an extern
socket source with a high accuracy timer to log timestamps when data
arrives. This timer would be delayed while writing to disk in a
blocking mode. I could buffer everything in a string stream until
application shutdown, as you said, but its a lot of data, so I would
prefer to avoid such extensiv memory usage. It would be great if the OS
performs the actual writing in a asynchronous way, but I'm not sure
about that with WindowsXP and Visual C++. The Standard says nothing
about the behaviour of std::ofstream::operator<<()

[David Harmon]

On 13 Dec 2005 13:32:35 -0800 in comp.lang.c++, mo****@gmail.com wrote,

It would be great if the OS
performs the actual writing in a asynchronous way, but I'm not sure
about that with WindowsXP and Visual C++. The Standard says nothing
about the behaviour of std::ofstream::operator<<()

You got it!

The C++ standard says nothing about it. And, of course, as this is not
comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.* or microsoft.public.win32.programmer.*
then "we" here should not speculate what some particular platform does
outside the C++ standard.