Richard Shen
Reputation: 53
Will killing a process recover leaked memory?
For example, when a particular application runs, it causes 10M of memory leaks. If I kill the process, will the 10M be recovered by the system?
I tried to check myself:
- I created an application that will cause 10M memory leak.
- Before I run it, I used "Memory Doctor" to check my free memory. (250.4M)
- After I run and kill it, the "Memory Doctor" show my free memory is 240M.
I want to confirm: when the application killed, will the memory consumed by the process be reclaimed by the operating system or not?
Upvotes: 4
Views: 3961
Answers (1)
Justin Swanhart
Reputation: 1856
Yes, killed processes will return any used memory to the operating system.
Keep in mind that any filesystem cache used by the application may not be free'd immediately.
Upvotes: 4
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