Do Small Memory Leaks Matter Anymore?

Question

With RAM typically in the Gigabytes on all PC\'s now, should I be spending time hunting down all the small (non-growing) memory leaks that may be in my program? I\'m talking abo

Answer 1

It all depends. Reasons not to worry: the process is short-lived, the leaks are small and/or infrequent, the cost of an out of memory exception is low (eg, a web server instance in a cluster needs restarting and a few fetches need retrying). So I agree that some leaks don't really matter in practical terms.

But on the other hand, if you do have cause to worry, or even feel a nagging sense of doubt that maybe you're not taking quality seriously enough, it's a small matter (in most cases) to run your software with a memory leak detector and fix the problems. There are many good leak detectors out there. And you might find that the leak is part of a more serious problem, such as not releasing other resources (like open files). You may even find that the harmless leak would turn quite dangerous in usage scenarios you haven't tested yet.