How big is the pipe buffer?

The capacity of a pipe buffer varies across systems (and can even vary on the same system). I am not sure there is a quick, easy, and cross platform way to just lookup the capacity of a pipe.

Mac OS X, for example, uses a capacity of 16384 bytes by default, but can switch to 65336 byte capacities if large write are made to the pipe, or will switch to a capacity of a single system page if too much kernel memory is already being used by pipe buffers (see xnu/bsd/sys/pipe.h, and xnu/bsd/kern/sys_pipe.c; since these are from FreeBSD, the same behavior may happen there, too).

One Linux pipe(7) man page says that pipe capacity is 65536 bytes since Linux 2.6.11 and a single system page prior to that (e.g. 4096 bytes on (32-bit) x86 systems). The code (include/linux/pipe_fs_i.h, and fs/pipe.c) seems to use 16 system pages (i.e. 64 KiB if a system page is 4 KiB), but the buffer for each pipe can be adjusted via a fcntl on the pipe (up to a maximum capacity which defaults to 1048576 bytes, but can be changed via /proc/sys/fs/pipe-max-size)).

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Here is a little bash/perl combination that I used to test the pipe capacity on my system:

#!/bin/bash
test $# -ge 1 || { echo "usage: $0 write-size [wait-time]"; exit 1; }
test $# -ge 2 || set -- "$@" 1
bytes_written=$(
{
    exec 3>&1
    {
        perl -e '
            $size = $ARGV[0];
            $block = q(a) x $size;
            $num_written = 0;
            sub report { print STDERR $num_written * $size, qq(\n); }
            report; while (defined syswrite STDOUT, $block) {
                $num_written++; report;
            }
        ' "$1" 2>&3
    } | (sleep "$2"; exec 0<&-);
} | tail -1
)
printf "write size: %10d; bytes successfully before error: %d\n" \
    "$1" "$bytes_written"

Here is what I found running it with various write sizes on a Mac OS X 10.6.7 system (note the change for writes larger than 16KiB):

% /bin/bash -c 'for p in {0..18}; do /tmp/ts.sh $((2 ** $p)) 0.5; done'
write size:          1; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:          2; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:          4; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:          8; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:         16; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:         32; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:         64; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:        128; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:        256; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:        512; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:       1024; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:       2048; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:       4096; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:       8192; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:      16384; bytes successfully before error: 16384
write size:      32768; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:      65536; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:     131072; bytes successfully before error: 0
write size:     262144; bytes successfully before error: 0

The same script on Linux 3.19:

/bin/bash -c 'for p in {0..18}; do /tmp/ts.sh $((2 ** $p)) 0.5; done'
write size:          1; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:          2; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:          4; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:          8; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:         16; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:         32; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:         64; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:        128; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:        256; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:        512; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:       1024; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:       2048; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:       4096; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:       8192; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:      16384; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:      32768; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:      65536; bytes successfully before error: 65536
write size:     131072; bytes successfully before error: 0
write size:     262144; bytes successfully before error: 0

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Note: The PIPE_BUF value defined in the C header files (and the pathconf value for _PC_PIPE_BUF), does not specify the capacity of pipes, but the maximum number of bytes that can be written atomically (see POSIX write(2)).

Quote from include/linux/pipe_fs_i.h:

/* Differs from PIPE_BUF in that PIPE_SIZE is the length of the actual
   memory allocation, whereas PIPE_BUF makes atomicity guarantees.  */

this shell-line can show pipe buffer size too:

M=0; while true; do dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=1 2>/dev/null; \
       M=$(($M+1)); echo -en "\r$M KB" 1>&2; done | sleep 999

(sending 1k chunks to blocked pipe until buffer full) ...some test outputs:

64K (intel-debian), 32K (aix-ppc), 64K (jslinux bellard.org)      ...Ctrl+C.

shortest bash-one-liner using printf:

M=0; while printf A; do >&2 printf "\r$((++M)) B"; done | sleep 999

Here are some further alternatives to explore the actual pipe buffer capacity using shell commands only:

# get pipe buffer size using Bash
yes produce_this_string_as_output | tee >(sleep 1) | wc -c

# portable version
( (sleep 1; exec yes produce_this_string_as_output) & echo $! ) | 
     (pid=$(head -1); sleep 2; kill "$pid"; wc -c </dev/stdin)

# get buffer size of named pipe
sh -c '
  rm -f fifo
  mkfifo fifo
  yes produce_this_string_as_output | tee fifo | wc -c &
  exec 3<&- 3<fifo
  sleep 1
  exec 3<&-
  rm -f fifo
'

# Mac OS X
#getconf PIPE_BUF /
#open -e /usr/include/limits.h /usr/include/sys/pipe.h
# PIPE_SIZE
# BIG_PIPE_SIZE
# SMALL_PIPE_SIZE
# PIPE_MINDIRECT