– Computer Memory Leaks. Why do they happen, and what happens?
In: Technology
Think of computer memory as a shed to store things in. When you want to add stuff to storage, you place a plastic bin of a certain size into the shed and put a label on it. You then put items into the bins based on the label. The bins prevent the contents from flowing into unintended areas and the labels tell you that it is in use.
When you are done with the contents of a bin, you remove the label. Periodically, you’ll go through the shed and remove all bins without labels.
A memory leak happens when you forget to remove the label off of bins you don’t need. As you keep adding labelled bins but don’t remove the labels to free up the space, you use up more and more memory until you run out of storage space.
This typically occurs when coders allocate memory space but forget to free up the space when they are done. In certain coding languages this must be done manually with separate lines of code.
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