Disadvantages of memory management

Disadvantages of memory management

Given that memory management is necessary and beneficial, what are the trade-offs? The most obvious is the delay it inserts into the memory access cycle. Before a translation can take place, the logical address from the processor must appear. The translation usually involves some form of table look up, where the contents of a segment register or the higher order address bits are used to locate a descriptor within a memory block. This descriptor provides the physical address bits and any partitioning information such as read only etc. These signals are combined with the original lower order address bits to form the physical memory address. This look up takes time, which must be inserted into the memory cycle, and usually causes at least one wait state. This slows the processor and system performance down.

In addition, there can be considerable overheads in manag-ing all the look up tables and checking access rights etc. These overheads appear on loading a task, during any memory alloca-tion and when any virtual memory system needs to swap memory blocks out to disk. The required software support is usually performed by an operating system. In the latter case, if the system memory is very small compared with the virtual memory size and application, the memory management driver will consume a lot of processing and time in simply moving data to and from the disk. In extreme cases, this overhead starts to dominate the system which is working hard but achieving very little. The addition of more memory relieves the need to swap and returns more of the system throughput to executing the application.