In computer science, a memory leak is a type of resource leak that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations[1] in a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released. A memory leak may also happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code.[2] A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code.
A space leak occurs when a computer program uses more memory than necessary. In contrast to memory leaks, where the leaked memory is never released, the memory consumed by a space leak is released, but later than expected.[3]
Because they can exhaust available system memory as an application runs, memory leaks are often the cause of or a contributing factor to software aging.
