Question

External fragmentation is:

when there's enough total memory space to satisfy a request but the available spaces aren't contiguous

when there's some unused memory that can't be allocated to a process

when the amount of available memory is less than the size of a process

when a process is broken up into smaller parts for memory allocation

Answer 1

External fragmentation is when there is enough total memory space to satisfy a request but the available spaces aren't contiguous.

Consider example there is total 5 bytes .First 2 bytes is occupied by p1 next 1 byte is occupied by p2 next 2bytes is occupied by p3

and in a mean while p1 and p2 completed its execution so the first two bytes and last 2 bytes are free.

Now when a process p4 comes with 3bytes though we have 4 bytes space we cannot accommodate p4 because those are not contiguous this is called EXTERNAL FRAGMENTATION.

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