A

Memory leak

problem occurs when a block of memory is allocated, never deallocated, and not reachable (there is no pointer available to deallocate the block). As a result, the block of memory cannot be:

Used by the application (because the application has no reference to it)
Freed (again because the application has no reference to it to pass to the free routine)

An application that leaks enough memory may run out of address space and fail, or cause the system to run out of swap space, resulting in system-wide instability or performance issues.

Intel Inspector

customarily displays memory leaks at the end of an analysis run when an application exits; however, you can also use the

Intel Inspector

on-demand memory leak detection feature to gather memory leak information while an application is running. This is useful if:

An application does not terminate (such as a server process).
You want memory leak information, but you do not want to wait for an application to terminate.
You want to determine if memory is leaked during a specific interval of application execution, or during a specific user action.
You want to discard information about allocations performed during initialization as a way of filtering out allocations that are not currently of interest.

A

Memory growth

problem occurs when a block of memory is allocated, but not deallocated, within a specific time segment during application execution.

Intel Inspector

can measure memory growth to help you ensure an application uses no more memory than expected. This includes:

Memory an application has allocated and still needs for future calculations
Memory an application has allocated and no longer needs, but has not deallocated
Memory an application has allocated and then leaked