Describe the term Fragmentation

Question

Describe the term Fragmentation with proper description.

Answer 1

Let consider a multiple partition allocation scheme with a hole of 18,464 bytes. Assume that the next method requests 18,462 bytes. If we allocate precisely the requested block, we are left with a hole of 2 bytes. The overhead to keep track of this hole will be substantially bigger than the hole itself. The all-purpose approach is to break the physical memory to fixed sized blocks and allocate memory in the unit of block sizes. With this, the memory allocated to a process might be slightly bigger than the requested memory.