Quote:
Originally Posted by oneillpt
After two bluescreens and finding virtual memory fragmented into over 60,000 fragments (it had been unfragmented before the bluescreens), taking multiple reboots to defragment fully
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What does this mean? While it is
possible to determine how physical memory is fragmented, or how any one process's virtual memory is fragmented, neither of these things are particularly meaningful, nor is either a persistent thing: both are cleared on reboot.
I suspect you are referring to fragmentation of the userstore (the USB partition accessible when you plug the thing into the computer) as reported by some disk defragmentation program. Fragmentation of this is harmless, since the problem with fragmentation on conventional rotating media is that they incur seeks, and seeks are really slow when you have to move a physical lump of metal around. The flash used for storage on a Kindle has no moving parts and can switch from reading in one place to reading in another in zero time, and in any case the "disk" you see is cobbled together out of various pieces scattered across the flash storage by the wear-levelling machinery. Running a disk defragmentation tool on it does nothing but wear the flash out very fast indeed, since any given eraseblock of flash has a limited number of writes before it is useless, and defragmentation often involves a lot of tiny writes widely scattered across the virtual disk surface, and that's more or less the worst case for wear-levelling algorithms.
Never, ever defragment flash. It cannot help and is sure to prematurely age your flash chip -- and since the Kindle's flash is not user-replaceable, that means prematurely aging the Kindle itself.
(Disk fragmentation cannot cause bluescreens anyway. It's routine and ubiquitous and, even on rotating storage, is only harmful to performance when there's a lot of it.)