Richard Wenninger wrote: > yes.. but when that process terminates... the memory should be returned to > the system, right? in which case... the OS never lost track of it.
Maybe there are different levels of memory leak? In many cases after you shut down a Windows program which continued to use more and more memory, the memory is freed for the OS. Example: (sadly) the recent versions of AbiWord (for Windows) that I've tested have a memory leak. If you invoke AbiWord and then open and close additional windows for documents, more and more memory is used, but not freed up until you close the last AbiWord window, at which point all the memory is restored. (Note: some memory is restored each time you close a document (window), but more and more is locked up until you finally close AbiWord completely. There seem to be other memory leaks that do not restore the lost memory until a reboot. Now that I've written this, I suspect that some of the memory leaks are in the operating system itself and some are in applications, thus making the difference. Maybe Linux (currently) has no leaks in the operating system itself. (But, I'll bet some of the development versions have had leaks.) Speculating, Randy Kramer
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