Memory Leak

Definitions

1. A bug where a program allocates memory but never releases it, causing memory usage to grow continuously until the process crashes or the OOM killer intervenes. In garbage-collected languages, occurs when objects are unintentionally kept reachable (e.g., growing event listener lists, unbounded caches, closures capturing large objects).

   In plain English: When a program keeps using more and more memory over time because it forgets to release memory it no longer needs.

   Example: "The Node process grows 50MB per hour — a memory leak in the WebSocket handler is storing every connection object in an array and never removing them."

Related Terms

• Cache
• Memory Allocation
• Retain Cycle
• Segfault
• Apache Arrow
• Memory Pool
• Page Fault
• CPU Cache
• Time Zone Handling
• Lazy Initialization
• Random Access
• String Builder