Effect of Internal Fragmentation

Due to Internal Fragmentation various types of effects occurs:

• Inefficient Memory Utilization: In internal fragmentation, memory wastage is observed in various ways. Due to this, a vast amount of memory goes unutilized, resulting in Inefficient Memory Utilization.
• Performance lag: Due to the memory scattering across several partially filled memory blocks caused by Internal Fragmentation, the I/O operations increase in number. This results in an increase in data access times and increased lagging in performance.
• The disintegration of Memory: When the two types of fragmentations internal and external mix up it leads to memory scattering. This phenomenon causes a disintegration in the memory stream which makes it fairly tough for the system to allocate contiguously.
• Trouble in Virtual Memory Management: Memory paging and memory swapping is the most important operation that helps to operate and manage virtual memory. Partially filled pages lead to page faults during the memory paging which ultimately affects the operations with the virtual memory.

Internal Fragmentation is a problem that occurs due to poor memory allocation and it results in wastage of memory. When a process is loaded into the system it requests memory which is essential for its working. The operating system allocates memory to processes to work with but if the memory happens to be smaller and bigger than the process requirement the extra space goes unused. This small amount of memory unutilization is the major Internal Fragmentation appearing in the Operating System.