A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems (see below) and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program.
Typical resource leaks include memory leak and handle leak, particularly file handle leaks, though memory is often considered separately from other resources.
A memory leak is a particular kind of unnecessary memory consumption by a computer program, where the program fails to release memory that is no longer needed.
This can be helpful in a corporate environment when, for example, your well-behaved application software has to co-exist with an application that has a memory leak.