How can I create a memory leak in Java?

Question

I just had an interview, and I was asked to create a memory leak with Java.

Needless to say, I felt pretty dumb having no clue on how to eve

Answer 1

I can copy my answer from here: Easiest way to cause memory leak in Java?

"A memory leak, in computer science (or leakage, in this context), occurs when a computer program consumes memory but is unable to release it back to the operating system." (Wikipedia)

The easy answer is: You can't. Java does automatic memory management and will free resources that are not needed for you. You can't stop this from happening. It will ALWAYS be able to release the resources. In programs with manual memory management, this is different. You cann get some memory in C using malloc(). To free the memory, you need the pointer that malloc returned and call free() on it. But if you don't have the pointer anymore (overwritten, or lifetime exceeded), then you are unfortunately incapable of freeing this memory and thus you have a memory leak.

All the other answers so far are in my definition not really memory leaks. They all aim at filling the memory with pointless stuff real fast. But at any time you could still dereference the objects you created and thus freeing the memory --> NO LEAK. acconrad's answer comes pretty close though as I have to admit since his solution is effectively to just "crash" the garbage collector by forcing it in an endless loop).

The long answer is: You can get a memory leak by writing a library for Java using the JNI, which can have manual memory management and thus have memory leaks. If you call this library, your java process will leak memory. Or, you can have bugs in the JVM, so that the JVM looses memory. There are probably bugs in the JVM, there may even be some known ones since garbage collection is not that trivial, but then it's still a bug. By design this is not possible. You may be asking for some java code that is effected by such a bug. Sorry I don't know one and it might well not be a bug anymore in the next Java version anyway.