
There are several advantages and disadvantages of memory-mapped files: Advantages and disadvantages of Memory Mapped files This way, a very large file (up to 2 GB) can easily be modified. The file appears accessible all at once because only portions of it are brought into memory, and other parts are swapped out. The file created with the above program is 128 MB long, which is probably larger than the space your OS will allow. import java.io.RandomAccessFile import import public class MemoryMappedFile MappedByteBuffer will also not be visible to other programs that have mapped the same file instead, they will cause private copies of the modified portions of the buffer to be created. It shows multiple and overlapped views of a memory-mapped file: The following illustration shows how multiple processes can have multiple and overlapping views of the same memory-mapped file at the same time. Very large files can be mapped without consuming large amounts of memory to copy the data. The data is always page-aligned, and no buffer copying is ever needed.The virtual memory subsystem of the operating system will perform intelligent caching of the pages, automatically managing memory according to system load.
JAVA MEMORY MAPPED FILE UPDATE
If the user modifies the mapped memory space, the affected page is automatically marked as dirty and will be subsequently flushed to the disk to update the file.As the user process deal with the mapped memory space, page faults will be generated automatically to bring in the file data from the disk.Data are read and written using the virtual memory capabilities built into the operating system rather than having to allocate, copy into, and then deallocate data buffers owned by the process. Accessing files via memory map is faster than using I/O functions such as fread and fwrite.

The principal benefits of memory mapping are efficiency, faster file access, the ability to share memory between applications, automatic memory management, and more points described below These files are suitable for creating shared memory for inter-process communications (IPC). When the last process has finished working with the file, the data is lost, and the file is reclaimed by garbage collection.

Memory-mapped filesĪ memory-mapped file is a segment of virtual memory that has been assigned a direct byte-for-byte correlation with some portion of a file. This utility can be quite useful for efficient file reads. In this short article, we’ll be looking at the memory -mapped file MappedByteBufferin the java.nio package.
