Understanding memory leak
Java's best benefit is the JVM, which offers memory management out of the box. We can create objects and Java's garbage collector takes care of freeing up memory for us. Still, memory leaks occur in Java applications. In the following section, we will see some common causes of memory leaks and walk through a few solutions to detect/avoid them.
Memory leak in Java
A memory leak occurs when the garbage collectorcould not collect the objects any longer being used/referenced by an application. If the objects are not garbage collected, the application uses more memory and, once the entire heap is full, the object cannot be allocated, which leads to OutOfMemoryError.
Heap memory has two types of objects—referenced objects and unreferenced objects. The garbage collector will remove all unreferenced objects. However, the garbage collector would not be able to remove referenced objects even though they aren't used by the application.
Common reasons for memory leaks
The following...
