Johnathan, The Iostreams library provides for built in buffering of filters which in principle should permit efficient use of filters even with streams that do not support filtering. However, in practice it does not appear to live up to expectations. More specifically, the following line in indirect_streambuf.hpp can lead to extremely fragmented reads to lower filters or devices: std::streamsize indirect_streambuf<T, Tr, Alloc, Mode>::xsgetn (char_type* s, std::streamsize n) { [...] streamsize amt = obj().read(s + avail, n - avail, next_); // n - avail may equal 10 or less [...] } This is true even if the filter buffer size is set to 1MiB or more. Large buffer sizes (> 2 MiB) greatly enhances read and write performance on many modern operating systems. This is particularly felt when reading and writing large files (> 4 GiB). Ideally, if you set a filter buffer policy (e.g. to 1 MiB) you would like all reads to lower filters and devices to request that value, except possibly for the last read. Fortunately, it is relatively trivial to disable Iostreams buffering altogether and write a buffering_shim_filter. But then I do not understand what purpose Iostreams buffering serves. I Googled through the online documentation and I didn't find a detailed discussion of its objectives, though there were some comments that touched on the subject matter during the review process. Perhaps you can further elaborate this subject matter. Regards, George.