How far can memory leaks go?

Memory leaks typically persist until the application is shut down or until the operating system reclaims resources released by the application upon closure or crash. In some cases, if the operating system fails to properly reclaim these resources, the memory leak may persist until the computer is restarted. Memory leaks cause the application's memory usage to gradually increase, which may degrade system performance and even lead to application or system crashes. Therefore, promptly identifying and fixing memory leaks is crucial. For instance, in a previous project, I developed a large-scale software application using C++. During development, I noticed that the program became unusually slow and eventually crashed after running for a while. By using memory analysis tools, we identified a memory leak issue: a data processing module allocated memory each time it processed data but failed to release it properly after the module completed its task. Fixing this issue not only resolved the memory leak but also significantly improved the program's stability and performance.