I'm going to be doing random-access reading from a read-only binary file. The interface to ifstream seems simpler than filebuf; but is there any use-case where filebuf would give better performance?
More details: I have a file of fixed-length (48-byte) records, and will be doing random-access reads in sequence -- read 1 record, process, read 1 record (from elsewhere), process, .... (Traversing a tree.) The file never changes. Since the records are fixed-length, I may later use a "character-type" that is the 48-byte record, but I don't imagine that has any performance effect.
May be if you are on Linux may be using mmap would get around the whole problem of reading the file bit by bit.
Or boost memory mapped files? http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_52_0/libs/iostreams/doc/classes/mapped_file.html