2. The process, or result, of splitting a large area of free
memory (on disk or in main memory) into smaller non-contiguous
blocks. This happens after many blocks have been allocated
and freed. For example, if there is 3 kilobytes of free space
and two 1k blocks are allocated and then the first one (at the
lowest address) is freed, then there will be 2k of free space
split between the two 1k blocks. The maximum size block that
could then be allocated would be 1k, even though there was 2k
free. The solution is to "compact" the free space by moving
the allocated blocks to one end (and thus the free space to