Sometimes output streams are buffered by the operating system for performance.
In other words, rather than writing each byte as it's written the bytes are
accumulated in a buffer ranging from several bytes to several thousand bytes.
Then, when the buffer fills up, all the data is written at once. The
flush()
method forces the data to be written whether or not the
buffer is full.
This is not the same as the buffering performed by a
BufferedOutputStream
. That buffering is handled by the Java
runtime. This buffering is at the native OS level. However, a call to
flush()
should empty both buffers