Journal Entry – Week 3 Reflection

This week covered memory virtualization and memory allocation strategies, and it was one of the busiest weeks so far because of PA3. Between reading Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective and working on the assignments, I started to really understand how memory is managed behind the scenes. The main topics were address spaces, address translation, segmentation, paging, and dynamic memory allocation. We also looked at how different strategies like first-fit, next-fit, and best-fit are used to decide where memory blocks go in the heap.

From the reading, I learned that the next-fit strategy is similar to first-fit but continues searching from where the last allocation ended instead of restarting every time. I thought that was pretty clever because it makes the search faster, though the book mentioned that it can lead to worse memory utilization over time. That made me realize that memory management is really a tradeoff between speed and efficiency. I liked seeing how these strategies are not just abstract concepts, but are part of how the heap and virtual memory actually work in practice.

PA3 definitely kept me busy this week. It was hard at first because I had to keep track of how address translation works, but it also helped me apply what I was reading. Once I started connecting the code to the theory from the modules and CSAPP, things began to make more sense. My “aha” moment was seeing how the operating system isolates memory for each process and how paging plays a big part in that. Even though it was a tough week, I feel like this was a big step in understanding how computers really manage memory.