Fragmentation

Previous: Virtual memory

Fragmentation is a concept in computer sciece that involves the distribution of data within a finite space. Memory needs to be structured in some way so that processes are unable to directly access memory from a different process.

There are two types of fragmentation:

• External: Occurs when using segmentation. Space between segments becomes wasted. Can be solved by compaction, but this is expensive.
• Internal: Occurs when using paging, because fixed size pages that aren’t full will inevitably waste spaces. Solved by having smaller pages, but that makes tradeoffs with the page table being larger.