What are the consequences of a memory leak in an application?

Memory leak is a situation where an application continues to occupy memory without releasing it after use. Consequences:

• Gradual increase in memory consumption, which can lead to application slowdown.
• Ultimately, a crash due to lack of memory (OutOfMemoryError in Java).
• Decreased performance due to frequent garbage collection.
• Negative impact on the stability and availability of the service.

To prevent this, it is important to identify and fix leaks using profilers and code analysis.