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

Memory leaks are very important in 32 bit applications because the application is limited to 2^32 bytes of memory which is approximately 4 GB. Once a 32 bit application attempts to allocate more than 2^32 bytes of memory the application may crash or hang.

Memory leaks are not as important in 64 bit applications because the application is limited to 2^64 bytes of memory which is approximately 16 EB; so with a 64 bit application you are more-so limited by hardware, but the OS will still likely impose an artificial limit at some time.

Bottom line is that having a memory leak in your code is bad programming; so fix it and be a better programmer.