What is memory leak?

Question

Accepted Answer

Memory leak is a situation where a program fails to release memory that is no longer needed, leading to memory exhaustion.

Memory leak occurs when dynamically allocated memory is not deallocated after it is no longer needed.
It can happen when a program forgets to free memory or loses track of memory addresses.
Memory leaks can gradually consume all available memory, causing the program to crash or slow down.
Examples of memory leaks include not freeing memory allocated with malloc() or new, or not closing file handles.

Accepted Answer

Memory leak causes due to allocating memory block inside the heap memory segment and forget to delete. Memory leak is serious issue for servers by which definition never terminate.