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

No, it does not matter, however, only if, as you pointed out, the memory leak must not be repetitive. Memory leaks that don't grow as a program progress is usually okay. Non-growing memory leaks will eventually be solved when a process terminate.

However, it is difficult to prove an observed memory leak is not growing; you have sufficient empirical data. In reality, many huge program (even written in Java/C#) have memory leaks, but most of them are non-growing leaks.

Seriously, we can't live without memory leaks, deadlocks, data races. Having these bugs itself are okay. Only when it kills your program, it matters.

But, I have to disagree with your opinion: "memory is cheap". That can't justify memory leaks. That's very dangerous.