Comparative Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Contiguous Memory Techniques

Abstract

Memory is a resource that must be carefully managed in computing systems due to its importance in job executions and in saving information. This paper is based on the techniques that operating systems use to manage memory allocation through simulation in allocating processes and data to partitioned memory. The physical memory of the computer system was modeled and simulation was performed under four contiguous allocation techniques namely; First-fit, Next-fit, Best-fit and Worst-fit with different percentages of free memory availability. Jobs and processes are assigned to the memory of a computer system that contained 512 kilobytes (KB) as memory capacity. Each of these techniques was tested and the result obtained revealed the capacity of memory wastage by each of them. This showed that the four tested algorithms do not optimize the storage concurrently. Thus, it was discovered that at 10% memory free, only the worst-fit algorithm had the highest memory wastage which is 120 KB while the other three techniques had the same memory wastage of 115 KB. The result repeated itself at 50% memory free in that worst-fit had 296 KB as the highest memory wastage. Therefore, out of the techniques considered, it was noticed that the worst-fit wasted the highest memory with a total of 1047 KB while the best-fit had the lowest memory wastage with a total of 1000 KB.