I/O Concepts

The following I/O concepts are described in this section.

In this section

Topic	Description
File Buffering	Describes considerations for application control of file buffering, also known as unbuffered file input/output (I/O).
File Caching	Windows caches file data that is read from disks and written to disks.
Synchronous and Asynchronous I/O	There are two types of input/output (I/O) synchronization: synchronous I/O and asynchronous I/O. Asynchronous I/O is also referred to as overlapped I/O.
Canceling Pending I/O Operations	Allowing users to cancel I/O requests that are slow or blocked can enhance the usability and robustness of your application.
Alertable I/O	Alertable I/O is the method by which application threads process asynchronous I/O requests only when they are in an alertable state.
I/O Completion Ports	I/O completion ports provide an efficient threading model for processing multiple asynchronous I/O requests on a multiprocessor system.