What can lead to increased RAM usage in an application?

The increase in RAM usage in a Go application can be caused by the following reasons:

• Memory leaks: holding references to objects that are no longer needed, for example, due to global variables or closures.
• Large slices or maps: creating and storing large data structures without clearing them.
• Frequent memory allocation without freeing: for example, creating many objects in a loop.
• Incorrect use of goroutines: if goroutines do not terminate, they can hold onto memory.
• Caching data without size limits.

For diagnostics, memory profiling using pprof can be employed.

Example of starting a memory profile:

import (
    "net/http"
    _ "net/http/pprof"
)

func main() {
    go func() {
        log.Println(http.ListenAndServe("localhost:6060", nil))
    }()
    // other code
}

Then, memory dumps can be analyzed to find leaks.