memory leak
termprogrammingops culture
Memory that a program allocates and never releases, so its footprint grows until something gives.
Not a crash but a slow bleed, which is what makes it hard: the process is fine for hours or weeks, then the machine starts swapping and the incident begins far from the cause. The classic fingerprint is a service that behaves perfectly after a restart, which is why nightly restarts became a folk remedy instead of a fix. Detectors like Valgrind and the address sanitizers exist precisely because the symptom appears so far from the allocation.
Also known as: leaking memory, unreleased memory