A Note on Storage Fragmentation and Program Segmentation

The main purpose of this paper is the presentation
of some of the results of a series of simulation 
experiments investigating the phenomenon of storage fragmentation.
 Two different types of storage fragmentation 
are distinguished: (1) external fragmentation, namely the
loss in storage utilization caused by the inability 
to make use of all available storage after it has been
fragmented into a large number of separate blocks; 
and (2) internal fragmentation, the loss of utilization
caused by rounding up a request for storage, 
rather than allocating only the exact number of words required.
 The most striking result is the apparently 
general rule that rounding up requests for storage,
to reduce the number of different sizes of blocks 
coexisting in storage, causes more loss of storage
by increased internal fragmentation than is saved 
by decreased external fragmentation.  Described also are
a method of segment allocation and an accompanying 
technique for segment addressing which take advantage
of the above result.  Evidence is presented of 
possible advantages of the method over conventional paging techniques.

CACM July, 1969

Randell, B.

storage allocation, storage fragmentation,
paging, segmentation, addressing

6.2 6.20

CA690701 JB February 17, 1978  9:46 AM

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