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javaudpgzipbytearrayoutputstream

Fastest way to GZIP and UDP a large amount of Strings in Java

I'm implementing a logging system that needs to encode the log messages with GZIP and send them off by UDP.

What I've got so far is:

Initialization:

DatagramSocket sock = new DatagramSocket(); 
baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
printStream = new PrintStream(new GZIPOutputStream(baos));

This printStream is then passed out of the logger - messages will arrive through it

Then every time a message arrives:

byte[] d = baos.toByteArray();
DatagramPacket dp = new DatagramPacket(d,d.length,host,port);
sock.send(dp);

What stumps me currently is that I can't find a way to remove the data from the ByteArrayOutputStream (toByteArray() only takes a copy) and I'm afraid that recreating all three stream objects every time will be inefficient.

Is there some way to remove sent data from the stream? Or should I look in another direction entirely?

Solution

  • The answers were helpful with other aspects of my problem, but for the actual question - there is a way to clear the data from a ByteArrayOutputStream. It has a reset() method. It doesn't actually clear the buffer, but it resets the count property to 0 causing it to ignore any data already in the buffer.

    Note that writing to a GZIPOutputStream after resetting the underlying ByteArrayOutputStream will cause an error, so I have not yet found a way to reuse everything.