What does "memory leak" mean in programming?
memory leak is one of the most common terms in software development. This guide explains what it means, how it is used in practice, and why it matters, with real examples from the developer world.
Definition
A bug where a program allocates memory but never releases it, causing memory usage to grow over time until the process crashes or the system slows to a halt. In garbage-collected languages, leaks often occur when references are unintentionally kept alive (e.g. event listeners not removed).
Example
"The server's memory grew by 100MB every hour. We found a memory leak: an array was accumulating event listeners that were never cleaned up."
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