The log buffer is the memory area that holds data to be written to the log files on disk. Log buffer size is defined by the innodb_log_buffer_size variable. The default size is 16MB. The contents of the log buffer are periodically flushed to disk. A large log buffer enables large transactions to run without the need to write redo log data to disk before the transactions commit. Thus, if you have transactions that update, insert, or delete many rows, increasing the size of the log buffer saves disk I/O.

The innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit variable controls how the contents of the log buffer are written and flushed to disk. The innodb_flush_log_at_timeout variable controls log flushing frequency.

For related information, see Memory Configuration, and Section 8.5.4, “Optimizing InnoDB Redo Logging”.