What is a ram memory leak and how to fix it

"Memory leak", surely you have heard this phrase before or have suffered it firsthand. A memory leak happens when an application consumes practically all the RAM of the system, leaving the computer unused until we manage to close it.

What is causing this problem?

Although it is less and less frequent, a memory leak problem has nothing to do with the system, but with a badly programmed application, which, when performing certain types of actions, consumes system RAM but does not free the portions that are not is using. This causes that with the passing of the hours, the application accumulates information in RAM that is not released as it normally would.

Memory leak problems were very frequent with old versions of the Mozilla Firefox browser (Back in 2011-2012), which fortunately have been almost completely solved today.

Currently the applications that most often have memory leak problems are precisely Internet browsers and torrent managers, this is logical since they are usually open all the time on our system.

Fix memory leak

To detect this problem, we can take a look at the Task Manager. There is no way to fix or prevent the memory leak, since it is not a problem of the operating system but of the specific software. Therefore, it is recommended to update the application that is the victim of this problem to a newer version or replace it with another that fulfills the same function.

In general this can be solved by deleting the application in the Task Manager but it may happen that it will not even be there, so there is no other option but to restart the computer.

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Another cause of the memory leak could be a driver or controller, so make sure which device we have recently connected to the computer or which driver we have installed that could be the culprit.