Much more complex are different chunks of data in the same circular buffer.

Example: The writer is reading data from small files, writing them into the same circular buffer.

A little bit more complex are multiple read pointers on the same circular buffer.

A circular buffer first starts empty and of some predefined length.

Perhaps the most common version of the circular buffer uses 8-bit bytes as elements.

Another solution is to keep counts of the number of items written to and read from the circular buffer.

However, expanding a circular buffer requires shifting memory, which is comparatively costly.

For details of a common implementation, see Circular buffer.)

Other typical operations supported by the hardware are circular buffers and look-up tables.

What is not shown in the example above is the mechanics of how the circular buffer is managed.

Common implementations are circular buffers and linked lists.

The useful property of a circular buffer is that it does not need to have its elements shuffled around when one is consumed.

Ping-pong buffering can be considered a very specialized circular buffer with exactly two large fixed-length elements.

Hardware modulo addressing, allowing circular buffers to be implemented without having to constantly test for wrapping.

The journal is a circular buffer of disk blocks that is never read in normal filesystem operation.

Should a maximum size be adopted for a queue, then a circular buffer is a completely ideal implementation; all queue operations are constant time.

In some situations, overwriting circular buffer can be used, e.g. in multimedia.

The data are stored in a round-robin database (circular buffer), thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Generally, a circular buffer requires four pointers:

This can result in elegant and robust circular buffer implementations even in multi-threaded environments.

The palette cache for each of the 2, 4, and 8-color modes is implemented as a circular buffer which stores the 256 most recently used palettes.

Where modulo indexing is available (hardware, and many digital signal processors), these can be implemented as circular buffers.

Some examples include circular buffers, named bits on an I/O port, and automatically indexed arrays.

If the delay is an integer multiple of samples digital delay lines are often implemented as circular buffers.

Assume that a 1 is written into the middle of the buffer (exact starting location does not matter in a circular buffer):