Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Memory leak
Summary
In computer science, a memory leak is a type of resource leak that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations in a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released. A memory leak may also happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code (i.e. unreachable memory). A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code.
A related concept is the "space leak", which is when a program consumes excessive memory but does eventually release it.
Because they can exhaust available system memory as an application runs, memory leaks are often the cause of or a contributing factor to software aging.
A memory leak reduces the performance of the computer by reducing the amount of available memory. Eventually, in the worst case, too much of the available memory may become allocated and all or part of the system or device stops working correctly, the application fails, or the system slows down vastly due to thrashing.
Memory leaks may not be serious or even detectable by normal means. In modern operating systems, normal memory used by an application is released when the application terminates. This means that a memory leak in a program that only runs for a short time may not be noticed and is rarely serious.
Much more serious leaks include those:
where a program runs for a long time and consumes added memory over time, such as background tasks on servers, and especially in embedded systems which may be left running for many years
where new memory is allocated frequently for one-time tasks, such as when rendering the frames of a computer game or animated video
where a program can request memory, such as shared memory, that is not released, even when the program terminates
where memory is very limited, such as in an embedded system or portable device, or where the program requires a very large amount of memory to begin with, leaving little margin for leaks
where a leak occurs within the operating system or memory manager
when a system device driver causes a leak
running on an operating system that does not automatically release memory on program termination.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.