Internal Fragmentation

1. What causes Internal Fragmentation in OS?

Already discussed in this article under “What is Internal Fragmentation?”.

2. Why is important to reduce Internal Fragmentation as much as possible?

It is important to reduce it as it causes the problems elaborated under the “Effect of Internal Fragmentation” given above.

3. Does Internal Fragmentation Affect Virtual Memory?

Internal Fragmentation does affect the virtual memory as it hinders the memory paging and swapping and that mainly affects the management of the virtual memory by OS.

4. What is the difference between Internal Fragmentation and External Fragmentation?

Understand this difference in-depth by referring to: Internal vs External Fragmentation.

5. Is it possible to completely eliminate Internal Fragmentation?

It might not be possible to eliminate Internal Fragmentation completely, there will be some amount always remaining. But by using careful techniques like dynamic memory allocation it can be reduced as much as possible.

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.