External fragmentation is a problem under some workloads, and buddyinfo is a useful tool for helping diagnose these problems. Buddyinfo will give you a clue as to how big an area you can safely allocate, or why a previous allocation failed.

cat /proc/buddyinfo
 
Node 0, zone      DMA      0      4      5      4      4      3 ...
Node 0, zone   Normal      1      0      0      1    101      8 ...
Node 0, zone  HighMem      2      0      0      1      1      0 ...

Each column represents the number of pages of a certain order which are available. In this case, there are 0 chunks of 2^0*PAGE_SIZE available in ZONE_DMA, 4 chunks of 2^1*PAGE_SIZE in ZONE_DMA, 101 chunks of 2^4*PAGE_SIZE available in ZONE_NORMAL, etc…

More information relevant to external fragmentation can be found in pagetypeinfo.