Date: January 1999
"Memory leaks" are caused by poorly designed applications that grab memory and do not release it. Over time, the "memory leak" will grow, grabbing all available memory. This increases paging activity, which severely degrades performance.
Memory leaks can be detected using the AIX "svmon" command. The "svmon" command provides a detailed listing of the memory used by each process. Using "svmon" to track memory usage by process over time will help identify applications with memory leaks.
The "svmon" command is specific to AIX. It has several useful options. See the man pages or other AIX documentation for on running this command.