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Slack Space
In computer storage, fragmentation is a phenomenon in the computer system which involves the distribution of data in to smaller pieces which storage space, such as computer memory or a hard drive, is used inefficiently, reducing capacity or performance and often both. The exact consequences of fragmentation depend on the specific system of storage allocation in use and the particular form of fragmentation. In many cases, fragmentation leads to storage space being "wasted", and programs will tend to run inefficiently due to the shortage of memory. Basic principle In main memory fragmentation, when a computer program requests blocks of memory from the computer system, the blocks are allocated in chunks. When the computer program is finished with a chunk, it can free it back to the system, making it available to later be allocated again to another or the same program. The size and the amount of time a chunk is held by a program varies. During its lifespan, a computer program can requ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Storage
Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The central processing unit (CPU) of a computer is what manipulates data by performing computations. In practice, almost all computers use a storage hierarchy, which puts fast but expensive and small storage options close to the CPU and slower but less expensive and larger options further away. Generally, the fast technologies are referred to as "memory", while slower persistent technologies are referred to as "storage". Even the first computer designs, Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and Percy Ludgate's Analytical Machine, clearly distinguished between processing and memory (Babbage stored numbers as rotations of gears, while Ludgate stored numbers as displacements of rods in shuttles). This distinction was extended in the Von Neumann archite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bin Packing Problem
The bin packing problem is an optimization problem, in which items of different sizes must be packed into a finite number of bins or containers, each of a fixed given capacity, in a way that minimizes the number of bins used. The problem has many applications, such as filling up containers, loading trucks with weight capacity constraints, creating file backups in media, splitting a network prefix into multiple subnets, and technology mapping in FPGA semiconductor chip design. Computationally, the problem is NP-hard, and the corresponding decision problem, deciding if items can fit into a specified number of bins, is NP-complete. Despite its worst-case hardness, optimal solutions to very large instances of the problem can be produced with sophisticated algorithms. In addition, many approximation algorithms exist. For example, the first fit algorithm provides a fast but often non-optimal solution, involving placing each item into the first bin in which it will fit. It requires ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kernel (operating System)
A kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system that always has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources (e.g. I/O, memory, cryptography) via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the use of common resources, such as CPU, cache, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup (after the bootloader). It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit. The critical code of the kernel is usua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
System
A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its open system (systems theory), environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and is expressed in its functioning. Systems are the subjects of study of systems theory and other systems sciences. Systems have several common properties and characteristics, including structure, function(s), behavior and interconnectivity. Etymology The term ''system'' comes from the Latin word ''systēma'', in turn from Greek language, Greek ''systēma'': "whole concept made of several parts or members, system", literary "composition"."σύστημα" , Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, ''A Greek–English Lexicon'', on Pers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Page (computer Memory)
A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, described by a single entry in a page table. It is the smallest unit of data for memory management in an operating system that uses virtual memory. Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system. A transfer of pages between main memory and an auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive, is referred to as paging or swapping. Explanation Computer memory is divided into pages so that information can be found more quickly. The concept is named by analogy to the pages of a printed book. If a reader wanted to find, for example, the 5,000th word in the book, they could count from the first word. This would be time-consuming. It would be much faster if the reader had a listing of how many words are on each page. From this listing they could determine which page the 5,000th word appears on, and h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Translation Lookaside Buffer
A translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is a memory CPU cache, cache that stores the recent translations of virtual memory address to a physical memory Memory_address, location. It is used to reduce the time taken to access a user memory location. It can be called an address-translation cache. It is a part of the chip's Memory management unit, memory-management unit (MMU). A TLB may reside between the Central processing unit, CPU and the CPU cache, between CPU cache and the main memory or between the different levels of the multi-level cache. The majority of desktop, laptop, and server processors include one or more TLBs in the memory-management hardware, and it is nearly always present in any processor that uses Memory paging, paged or Memory segmentation, segmented virtual memory. The TLB is sometimes implemented as content-addressable memory (CAM). The CAM search key is the virtual address, and the search result is a physical address. If the requested address is present in the TLB ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Working Set
Working set is a concept in computer science which defines the amount of memory that a process (computing), process requires in a given time interval. Definition Peter_J._Denning, Peter Denning (1968) defines "the working set of information W(t, \tau) of a process (computing), process at time t to be the collection of information referenced by the process during the process time interval (t - \tau, t)". Typically the units of information in question are considered to be page (computer memory), memory pages. This is suggested to be an approximation of the set of pages that the process will access in the future (say during the next \tau time units), and more specifically is suggested to be an indication of what pages ought to be kept in main memory to allow most progress to be made in the execution of that process. Rationale The effect of the choice of what pages to be kept in main memory (as distinct from being ''paged out'' to auxiliary storage) is important: if too many pages o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thrashing (computer Science)
In computer science, thrashing occurs in a system with virtual memory when a computer's real storage resources are ''overcommitted'', leading to a constant state of paging and page faults, slowing most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or even collapse. The situation can continue indefinitely until the user closes some running applications or the active processes free up additional virtual memory resources. After initialization, most programs operate on a small number of code and data pages compared to the total memory the program requires. The pages most frequently accessed at any point are called the working set, which may change over time. When the working set is not significantly greater than the system's total number of real storage ''page frames'', virtual memory systems work most efficiently, and an insignificant amount of computing is spent resolving page faults. As the total of the working sets grows, resolving page fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MultiFinder
MultiFinder is an extension for the Apple Macintosh's classic Mac OS, introduced on August 11, 1987 and included with System Software 5. It adds cooperative multitasking of several applications at once – a great improvement over the previous Macintosh systems, which can only run one application at a time. With the advent of System 7, MultiFinder became a standard integrated part of the operating system and remained so until the introduction of Mac OS X. History Background The first Macintosh was released in 1984, and Apple's developers made an early decision that the machine's 128 KB of RAM was so limited that they must abandon the application multitasking functionality that Apple had developed for the Lisa. As the successive Macintosh hardware models were released with much more RAM being the key feature, new programming techniques were developed as workarounds to allow users to run concurrent applications. Desk Accessories became a staple through the lifespan of System ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fixed-size Blocks Allocation
Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time. Several methods have been devised that increase the effectiveness of memory management. Virtual memory systems separate the memory addresses used by a process from actual physical addresses, allowing separation of processes and increasing the size of the virtual address space beyond the available amount of RAM using paging or swapping to secondary storage. The quality of the virtual memory manager can have an extensive effect on overall system performance. The system allows a computer to appear as if it may have more m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Garbage Collection (computer Science)
In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The ''garbage collector'' attempts to reclaim memory that was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called ''garbage (computer science), garbage''. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy (computer scientist), John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp (programming language), Lisp. Garbage collection relieves the programmer from doing manual memory management, where the programmer specifies what objects to de-allocate and return to the memory system and when to do so. Other, similar techniques include stack-based memory allocation, stack allocation, region inference, and memory ownership, and combinations thereof. Garbage collection may take a significant proportion of a program's total processing time, and affect computer performance, performance as a result. Resources other than memory, such a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Extent (file Systems)
In computing, an extent is a contiguous area of storage reserved for a file in a file system, represented as a range of block numbers, or tracks on count key data devices. A file can consist of zero or more extents; one file fragment requires one extent. The direct benefit is in storing each range compactly as two numbers, instead of canonically storing every block number in the range. Also, extent allocation results in less file fragmentation. Extent-based file systems can also eliminate most of the metadata overhead of large files that would traditionally be taken up by the block-allocation tree. But because the savings are small compared to the amount of stored data (for all file sizes in general) but make up a large portion of the metadata (for large files), the overall benefits in storage efficiency and performance are slight. In order to resist fragmentation, several extent-based file systems do allocate-on-flush. Many modern fault-tolerant file systems also do cop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
