Dictionary.net

What happens when you try to store more data ina buffer than it can handle. This may be due to a mismatchin the processing rates of the producing and consumingprocesses (see overrun and firehose syndrome), or becausethe buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that mustaccumulate before a piece of it can be processed. Forexample, in a text-processing tool that crunches a line at atime, a short line buffer can result in lossage as inputfrom a long line overflows the buffer and overwrites databeyond it. Good defensive programming would check foroverflow on each character and stop accepting data when thebuffer is full.See also spam, overrun screw.