Understanding memory leaks

- [Instructor] Put away the drip pan. A memory leak doesn't make a mess, at least not a physical one. No, a computer memory leak is a runaway program. It occupies a chunk of memory or continues to gobble up more memory without letting go. Often the program continues to grab memory as the computer slowly grinds to a halt. One way to find a memory leak is to use the Resource Monitor utility. Press the Windows + r keyboard shortcut and type resmon for Resource Monitor. Okay, to look for a memory leak, ensure that the memory item is expanded. You can close the other items if they're open. The memory window is shown down here. It graphically charts memory usage over time. And what you're looking for is a program that keeps gobbling up memory as it runs. Now I've created such a program, and it's called leaker. Let me locate it in the list. And here it is. And as you can see by this commit column, the leaker program continually gobbles up more and more memory as it stays in memory and runs. This program dramatically represents a memory leak, though some real-world examples are less overt, and unfortunately there's nothing you can do about this leak here in the Resource Monitor window. It's just a reporting tool. The real way to get rid of a leaky memory program, now that we know the name, is to press Control + Shift + Escape to bring up the task manager window. And if you don't see the window expanded, choose the More Details item here. What you're looking for is the program that's causing the memory leak. For this example, the Windows command line processor is running the leaker program, which I see here. I will click to select it and click in task to shut it down, and it stops. Back in the Resource Monitor, you see the program is gone or you may see a ghost image of the program, either way it's gone. The program has stopped gobbling up memory, and the memory it's used is freed. I suppose the entry may stay as a ghost on some systems as a diagnostic tool. Still, the leaker program proved its worth. The Resource Monitor dramatically showed how it was consuming memory over time, and had it run unabated, eventually it could consume all memory in the computer, slowing the system or causing other issues. Follow a similar course of action to discover and eliminate memory leaks you find in your computer. Closing the program is all you can do. The memory leak is a coding error that must be fixed by the programmer. You can report the leak to the developer or check their website to see if it's a known issue or whether an update or patch is available. These things are best to discover early before they slow your computer's performance to a painful crawl.