Shortcut for Spotting Memory Leaks

1. Launch Task Manager.

2. Click the Processes tab.

3. Click Mem Usage to arrange the processes by memory use.

4. Use common sense to determine if an application has a memory leak. For example, if an application has run all day or for several days and is using more memory than you’d expect (such as Netscape using 45MB), the application probably isn’t allocating memory correctly.

If you find an application that is suspect, perform the following steps: Shut down the application, log off and log back on, relaunch Task Manager, click the Processes tab, click Mem Usage to arrange the processes by memory use, and restart the application. You'll see immediately how much memory the application needs to start (e.g., 3140KB). This figure provides a baseline estimate of the required memory. If this number grows substantially over time, the process might have a memory leak.