As with everything, it depends.<p>Buffers I believe were created for doing IO operations, wherein you need to move chunks of things around, wherein the underlying net stack needs to fill, flip, copy etc..<p>If you're building a video compression library with native components, then Buffers are probably going to help.<p>If you're living purely in Javaland memory managed space, then it's entirely another question, but know that in the vast majority of cases it won't matter.