Tolerating memory leaks
Michael D. Bond, Kathryn S. McKinley · 2008
Type safety and garbage collection in managed languages eliminate memory errors such as dangling pointers, double frees, and leaks of unreachable objects. Unfortunately, a program still leaks memory if it maintains references to objects it will never use again. Leaked objects decrease program locality and increase garbage collection frequency and workload. A growing leak will eventually exhaust memory and crash the program.