Question

Answer the following question as if you are explaining it to a high school student who doesn't have a lot of experience with computers: Is there a difference between memory compaction and memory deallocation? If so, what is it? And explain a scenario where one each one would be useful.

Answer 1

Memory Compaction:

Compaction is the process in which the free space is collected in a large memory chunk to make some space available for other processes. In Memory management, swapping creates multiple fragments in the memory because of the processes moving in and out. Compaction refers to compaction all the empty spaces together and processes. Compaction helps to solve the problem of External Fragmentation, but it requires too much of CPU time.

Compaction moves all the allocated or occupied areas of store to one end and leaves large free space for incoming jobs i.e., combines all the free spaces . In Compaction,the system also maintains relocation information and it must be performed on each new allocation of job to the memory or completion of job from memory.

Compaction is different from Memory deallocation because compaction collects all the free spaces together,whereas memory Deallocation is used to free the Random Access memory of finished processes and allocate new ones.

Memory Deallocation:

Memory Deallocation is a way to  free the Random Access memory of finished processes and allocate new ones.A process has to be loaded into the RAM for its execution and remains in the RAM until its completion. Finished processes are deallocated or removed from the memory and new processes are allocated again.In high-level,programming memory deallocation is done by garbage collection. Garbage Collection is not supported by Low-level programming languages.