Memory leakage occurs when a program endlessly consumes more and more RAM. It occurs because of a logical error in a program which enters into a loop that cannot or might not be exited. Spyware can sometimes be a good example of this. Software of this type repeatedly opens new instances of itself and other programs, to prevent you from shutting them down, but possibly killing any usability of your system by using all the resources to recursively keep itself open.
In the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, there has been a problem identified with memory leakage. Memory used by child processes sometimes are not freed. This means that a program may call another program, but when it is done with the other program, it doesn't clear the memory used by the other program. So, if the parent program calls the child program repeatedly, that child program may be taking up that many times as much memory.
I can't tell you off hand any details about memory leakage occuring in Mac OS. It does happen though. There have been several problems with the PICT files and memory leaks. As I said though, I do not know the details.
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