the.com/memory leak
the program keeps asking for more room and never once cleans its plate.
means a bug where allocated memory is never released after it's no longer needed, slowly starving the system.
from coined as computers moved to dynamic memory allocation in the 1960s-70s; the metaphor imagines RAM as a bucket quietly dripping out unrecoverable space.
detection toolsvalgrind and purify hunt leaks for a living
garbage collectionlanguages like java reduce but don't eliminate leaks
symptomapps get slower the longer they stay open
famous caseearly browsers leaked memory per tab, crashing systems