Section 12.8: Fragmentation (Frame 2)                     [prev][home][next]

Jobs request a certain amount of memory when they start, leaving enough room for the heap and run-time stack to grow. Commonly, a job doesn't use all the of the memory it requests and we say that memory suffers internal fragmentation, internal because these unused regions are inside programs. The earlier kind of fragmentation is called external fragmentation because it is outside the jobs.