Buffered reading from stdin using fread in C

Question

I am trying to efficiently read from the stdin by using setvbuf in `_IOFBF~ mode. I am new to buffering. I am looking for working examples

Answer 1

I am going to recommend trying full buffering with setvbuf and ditching fread. If the specification is that there is one number per line, I will take that for granted, use fgets to read in a full line and pass it to strtoul parse the number that is supposed to be on that line.

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

#define INITIAL_BUFFER_SIZE 2 /* for testing */

int main(void) {
    int n;
    int divisor;
    int answer = 0;
    int current_buffer_size = INITIAL_BUFFER_SIZE;
    char *line = malloc(current_buffer_size);

    if ( line == NULL ) {
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    setvbuf(stdin, (char*)NULL, _IOFBF, 0);

    scanf("%d%d\n", &n, &divisor);

    while ( n > 0 ) {
        unsigned long dividend;
        char *endp;
        int offset = 0;
        while ( fgets(line + offset, current_buffer_size, stdin) ) {
            if ( line[strlen(line) - 1] == '\n' ) {
                break;
            }
            else {
                int new_buffer_size = 2 * current_buffer_size;
                char *tmp = realloc(line, new_buffer_size);
                if ( tmp ) {
                    line = tmp;
                    offset = current_buffer_size - 1;
                    current_buffer_size = new_buffer_size;
                }
                else {
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        errno = 0;
        dividend = strtoul(line, &endp, 10);
        if ( !( (endp == line) || errno ) ) {
            if ( dividend % divisor == 0 ) {
                answer += 1;
            }
        }
        n -= 1;
    }

    printf("%d\n", answer);
    return 0;
}

I used a Perl script to generate 1,000,000 random integers between 0 and 1,000,000 and checked if they were divisible by 5 after compiling this program with gcc version 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3) on my Windows XP laptop. The whole thing took less than 0.8 seconds.

When I turned buffering off using setvbuf(stdin, (char*)NULL, _IONBF, 0);, the time went up to about 15 seconds.