Memory leak
When a computer program fails to release unnecessary memory / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 (i.e. unreachable memory).[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.
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A related concept is the "space leak", which is when a program consumes excessive memory but does eventually release it.[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.