Editing Memory leak (section)

==External detection==

[[File:Sample sawtooth.jpg|thumb|The "sawtooth" pattern of memory utilization: the sudden drop in used memory is a candidate symptom for a memory leak.]]

A "sawtooth" pattern of memory utilization may be an indicator of a memory leak within an application, particularly if the vertical drops coincide with reboots or restarts of that application. Care should be taken though because [[garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collection]] points could also cause such a pattern and would show a healthy usage of the heap.

Constantly increasing memory usage is not necessarily evidence of a memory leak. Some applications will store ever increasing amounts of information in memory (e.g. as a [[cache (computing)|cache]]). If the cache can grow so large as to cause problems, this may be a programming or design error, but is not a memory leak as the information remains nominally in use. In other cases, programs may require an unreasonably large amount of memory because the programmer has assumed memory is always sufficient for a particular task; for example, a graphics file processor might start by reading the entire contents of an image file and storing it all into memory, something that is not viable where a very large image exceeds available memory. Confirmation that excessive memory use is due to a memory leak requires access to the program code.{{facts|date=February 2025}}