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

Are memory leaks ever ok?

Sure, if it's a short-lived process.

Memory leaks over a long period of time are, as the 85-point answer implies, problematic. Take a simple desktop app, for example -- prior to versions 3.x, did you ever notice how you needed it reboot Firefox after a while to recover it from sluggishness?

As for the short term, no, it doesn't matter. Take CGI or PHP scripts for example, or the little Perl three-liner in your ~/bin directory. Nobody's going to call the memory police if you write a 30-line non-looping application in C with 5 lines of malloc() and not a single call to free().