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<span id="openzim-page-title" class="mw-page-title-main"><span class="mw-page-title-main">Chunking (computing)</span></span>
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</style><div role="note" class="hatnote navigation-not-searchable">Not to be confused with <a href="Thunking" class="mw-redirect" title="Thunking">Thunking</a>.</div>
<p>In <a href="Computer_programming" title="Computer programming">computer programming</a>, <b>chunking</b> has multiple meanings.
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<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="In_memory_management">In memory management</h2></div>
<p>Typical modern <a href="Software" title="Software">software</a> systems allocate <a href="Computer_memory" title="Computer memory">memory</a> dynamically from structures known as <a href="Dynamic_memory_allocation" class="mw-redirect" title="Dynamic memory allocation">heaps</a>. Calls are made to heap-management routines to allocate and free memory. Heap management involves some computation time and can be a performance issue. <b>Chunking</b> refers to strategies for improving performance by using special knowledge of a situation to aggregate related memory-allocation requests. For example, if it is known that a certain kind of object will typically be required in groups of eight, instead of allocating and freeing each object individually, making sixteen calls to the heap manager, one could allocate and free an array of eight of the objects, reducing the number of calls to two.
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<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="In_HTTP_message_transmission">In HTTP message transmission</h2></div>
<div role="note" class="hatnote navigation-not-searchable">Main article: <a href="Chunked_transfer_encoding" title="Chunked transfer encoding">Chunked transfer encoding</a></div>
<p><b>Chunking</b> is a specific feature of the <a href="HTTP" title="HTTP">HTTP</a> 1.1 protocol.<sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-1"><span class="cite-bracket">[</span>1<span class="cite-bracket">]</span></a></sup> Here, the meaning is the opposite of that used in memory management. It refers to a facility that allows inconveniently large messages to be broken into conveniently-sized smaller "chunks".
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<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="In_data_deduplication,_data_synchronization_and_remote_data_compression">In data deduplication, data synchronization and remote data compression</h2></div>
<p>In <a href="Data_deduplication" title="Data deduplication">data deduplication</a>, <a href="Data_synchronization" title="Data synchronization">data synchronization</a> and remote <a href="Data_compression" title="Data compression">data compression</a>, Chunking is a process to split a file into smaller pieces called chunks by the chunking algorithm. It can help to eliminate duplicate copies of repeating data on storage, or reduces the amount of data sent over the network by only selecting changed chunks. The Content-Defined Chunking (CDC) algorithm like <a href="Rolling_hash" title="Rolling hash">Rolling hash</a> and its variants have been the most popular data deduplication algorithms for the last 15 years.<sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-2"><span class="cite-bracket">[</span>2<span class="cite-bracket">]</span></a></sup>
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<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="See_also">See also</h2></div>
<ul><li><a href="Chunk_(information)" title="Chunk (information)">Chunk (information)</a>, a fragment of data within certain file formats</li></ul>
<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="References">References</h2></div>
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<li id="cite_note-1"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><b><a href="#cite_ref-1">^</a></b></span> <span class="reference-text"><style data-mw-deduplicate="TemplateStyles:r1238218222">
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</style><cite class="citation web cs1"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.6.1">"HTTP/1.1: Protocol Parameters"</a><span class="reference-accessdate">. Retrieved <span class="nowrap">2019-12-10</span></span>.</cite></span>
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<li id="cite_note-2"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><b><a href="#cite_ref-2">^</a></b></span> <span class="reference-text"><cite class="citation conference cs1"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc16/atc16-paper-xia.pdf"><i>FastCDC: a Fast and Efficient Content-Defined Chunking Approach for Data Deduplication</i></a> <span class="cs1-format">(PDF)</span>. USENIX ATC ’16. 2016<span class="reference-accessdate">. Retrieved <span class="nowrap">2019-12-10</span></span>.</cite></span>
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