Why does paging incur memory overhead in operating

Solution

Paging is a memory management scheme that eliminates the need for contiguous allocation of physical memory and allows processes to be stored in non-contiguous locations, thereby reducing fragmentation. However, this flexibility comes at a cost: memory overhead . Paging incurs memory overhead primarily because it requires additional memory to store page tables . A page table maps virtual addresses to physical addresses, and each process has its own page table. For large processes, these tables can become quite large themselves, consuming significant amounts of memory. Additionally, to speed up memory access, Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs) are used to cache recent translations of virtual to physical addresses, and managing these buffers also adds to the overhead.