What is Fragmentation?

Fragmentation

As processes are loaded and removed from memory, the free memory space is broken into little pieces. It happens after sometimes that processes cannot be allocated to memory blocks considering their small size and memory blocks remains unused. This problem is known as Fragmentation.

Fragmentation is of two types −

S.N.	Fragmentation & Description
1	External fragmentation Total memory space is enough to satisfy a request or to reside a process in it, but it is not contiguous, so it cannot be used.
2	Internal fragmentation Memory block assigned to process is bigger. Some portion of memory is left unused, as it cannot be used by another process.