(Bilgisayar) In computer science, a memory leak is a particular kind of unintentional memory consumption by a computer program where the program fails to release memory when no longer needed. This condition is normally the result of a bug in a program that prevents it from freeing up memory that it no longer needs
When programs start, they are given areas of memory for their very own When the programs stop, they are supposed to notify the operating system that these areas are available for other programs This doesn't always happen Sometimes programs don't give the memory back, leaving it in limbo, unusable for other programs This "leak" of memory away from usefulness can cut into your computer's performance Sad to say, it's a common failure of Windows programs If the operating system doesn't stop such leaks, the only way to get all the memory back into operation again is to restart
n An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion Also (esp at CMU) called {core leak} These problems were severe on older machines with small, fixed-size address spaces, and special "leak detection" tools were commonly written to root them out With the advent of virtual memory, it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got a *real* leak!) See {aliasing bug}, {fandango on core}, {smash the stack}, {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}, {leaky heap}, {leak}
A bug in a program that prevents it from freeing discarded memory and causes it to use increasing amounts of memory A KEXT that experiences a memory leak may not be able to unload
``An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion ''
Memory no longer needed, but not deallocated by the OO system An application should finalize an object when it is no longer required When an application no longer has a handle to an object which still exists, the object is effectively unreachable, and can no longer be finalized This is a memory leak
Making malloc calls without the corresponding calls to free The result is that the amount of heap memory used continues to increase as the process runs
A situation in which memory that is no longer being used has not been returned to the pool of free memory A garbage collector is designed to return unreferenced objects to the free memory pool in order to avoid memory leaks
A programming term describing the losing of memory This happens when the program allocates some memory but fails to return it to the system Excessive memory leaks can lead to program failure after a sufficiently long period of time