As long as an application produces only a small amount of memory leaks no harm is done. If, however, the application has many (or large) memory leaks that accumulate over time, then the waste of memory might have an adverse effect on the application's overall efficiency - possibly to a degree where the application goes out of memory and crashes.  As a precaution it is advisable to search for memory leaks in an application and to eleminate them before they cause harm.

Without a tool it is virtually impossible to detect a memory leak.  For this reason we will be using a couple of tools that support memory leak detection.  The lecture will discuss strategies for finding memory leaks; they differ depending on the nature of the respective memory leak. During the workshop's hands-on part the attendants will have the opportunity to try out the tools and practice the search for memory leaks.