Understanding memory leaks
A memory leak occurs when objects that are no longer needed are not freed up. This causes these objects to accumulate in memory. Given that memory is a finite resource, this can eventually result in your application slowing down or even crashing (with an out-of-memory (OOM) error).
Having fast servers or hosting your application in the cloud does not abstract you from the effects of poor memory management (memory leaks). As stated earlier, memory is a finite resource and even fast servers can run out of memory. If deploying on the cloud, it is tempting to simply scale up to address the issue of memory leaks; however, this results in higher costs for deploying an instance that is larger than it needs to be. It can even lead to hefty cloud service bills.
How fast you run out of memory depends on where in your code the memory leak occurs. If this is a piece of code that seldom runs, it will take a long time for the memory to get full. However, if this...