mälulekked

Mälulekked, or memory leaks, are a type of resource leak that occurs in computer science when a program no longer needs a block of memory, but fails to release it back to the operating system or memory management pool. This causes the program to consume more and more memory over time, potentially leading to performance degradation, instability, or even system crashes.

Memory leaks typically arise from programming errors. A common cause is allocating memory dynamically and then losing the reference to that memory before it is deallocated. For example, if a programmer allocates memory for a variable and then reassigns that variable to point to a new memory location without freeing the original memory, the original block becomes inaccessible and cannot be reclaimed. This is particularly prevalent in languages that require manual memory management, such as C and C++.

While modern operating systems and programming languages have garbage collection mechanisms that can automatically reclaim unused memory, these systems are not always perfect and can still miss certain types of leaks, especially in complex applications or when dealing with circular references. Detecting memory leaks often requires specialized debugging tools and careful code analysis.

The consequences of a significant memory leak can range from a gradual slowdown of the application to the program consuming all available memory, forcing the operating system to terminate it or other applications. In server environments, unchecked memory leaks can lead to service outages. Therefore, identifying and fixing memory leaks is a crucial part of software development and maintenance to ensure program stability and efficient resource utilization.