What role does memory compaction play in managing memory fragmentation, and how does it contrast with defragmentation?

Memory compaction is a process that consolidates free memory spaces in RAM to create larger contiguous blocks of free memory, addressing external fragmentation. Defragmentation, on the other hand, is primarily used on storage devices like hard drives to organize files more sequentially, reducing the time needed to access files.

Memory compaction and defragmentation are identical processes with different names, used interchangeably in the context of both RAM and disk storage. Both techniques rearrange memory to eliminate gaps and improve system performance.

Memory compaction refers to the process of increasing the speed of memory access by caching frequently used data, whereas defragmentation is a technique that reduces the physical size of files in memory to free up space.

Defragmentation is a technique used to compress data in memory, thereby increasing the overall capacity of RAM, while memory compaction is a cleanup process that removes unnecessary data from the system's memory.