Tag

fragmentation

14 articles

Oct 22, 2026 Tunnel Encapsulation Overhead and Path MTU Discovery How many bytes each overlay scheme adds, why ICMP-based path MTU discovery breaks across a tunnel, and the options for keeping an inner frame inside the underlay MTU. networking
Sep 30, 2026 Measuring Fragmentation: Free Space That Cannot Be Used How internal and external fragmentation differ, why a heap can be mostly free and still fail a large request, and which ratios turn free space into a number that predicts allocation failure. memory systems
Jun 26, 2026 Mark-Sweep and the Fragmentation It Leaves Behind How a sweep pass rebuilds allocatable space, why segregated free lists and size classes delay the fragmentation problem rather than solve it, and what coalescing costs. language runtimes
May 25, 2026 Size-Class Segregation and Fit Policy in the Heap Why bucketing free blocks by size turns an unbounded search into a bounded one, how rounding requests up to a class wastes memory, and how fit policy interacts with fragmentation. memory systems
May 13, 2026 Boundary Tags and Coalescing in a Free-List Heap How a heap finds the neighbours of a freed block using headers at both ends, why coalescing is necessary for reuse, and what the deferred variants cost in latency. memory systems
Apr 22, 2026 MTU and Fragmentation Across a VPC Boundary Why the usable MTU inside a virtual network is smaller than the physical link MTU, how encapsulation and translation each consume bytes, and what happens when a packet that needs fragmenting is dropped instead. cloud infrastructure
Apr 17, 2026 When Fragmentation Turns into a Latency Problem How address-space spread and shrinking TLB reach convert fragmentation from a capacity problem into a latency one, and how to detect the shift. performance engineering
Nov 30, 2025 Large Pages: What 2 MiB Granularity Buys and What It Breaks How huge pages collapse page-table levels and extend translation reach, why physical contiguity is the binding constraint, and where the memory waste becomes unacceptable. memory systems
Nov 3, 2025 Link MTU, Jumbo Frames, and Where the Path Breaks Why 1500 bytes became the standard payload, what changes when both ends agree on more, and how MTU mismatches appear as silent large-packet loss. networking
Oct 15, 2025 Free Lists: Threading Reuse Through the Blocks an Allocator Has Released How an allocator stores its free list inside the freed memory itself, why coalescing needs boundary tags, and what size-class segregation does to fragmentation. data structures
Oct 10, 2025 Fragmentation Without Leaks: Diagnosing a Growing Heap Why a process whose live set is flat can still grow, how internal and external fragmentation differ in cause and cure, and which counters distinguish the two. memory systems
Jul 16, 2025 Fragmentation, the MTU Floor, and Path MTU Discovery Black Holes How a datagram is split into pieces that a smaller link can carry, why the reassembly rules create ambiguity, and the specific way discovery fails when ICMP is filtered. networking
Apr 8, 2025 Placement as Bin Packing: Multi-Dimensional Fit and the Fragmentation It Creates Why a scheduler with free cores and free memory can still refuse a pod, how multi-dimensional packing produces unusable holes, and which scoring functions trade density against headroom. cloud infrastructure
Apr 7, 2025 Fragmenting Encoded Frames to Fit the Path MTU Why a codec frame larger than a datagram needs RTP-level fragmentation, how the marker bit and timestamp stay shared, and what happens when one fragment is lost. internet protocols