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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Memory leak

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, memory leak means: A bug where a program keeps memory it no longer needs, so its memory use grows over time until it slows down or crashes.

In Turkish: bellek sızıntısı

How it is used

Typical signs are memory usage that only goes up and a service that has to be restarted every few days. Common causes include event listeners or caches that are never cleared. Developers track down and fix a memory leak with a profiler.

Example sentences

  1. The worker uses 4 GB after a week, so we probably have a memory leak.

  2. The memory leak came from a cache that never removed old entries.

Common collocations

  • track down a memory leak
  • fix a memory leak
  • memory usage
  • memory profiler
  • crashTo stop working suddenly because of an error, so that the program closes or stops responding. Also a noun: 'a crash'.
  • debugTo search for the cause of a problem in a program and remove it, often by running the code step by step and checking values.
  • root causeThe deepest, original reason a problem happened, as opposed to the symptoms that people noticed first.
  • infinite loopA loop that never stops because its exit condition is never met, which can freeze a program or use 100% of the CPU.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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